Privacy aside (which still presents issues because disabling this feature is NOT INTUITIVE), this was an incredibly stupid business move as well.
Just listen to your users absolutely tearing you apart for this - I would be rolling this back ASAP.
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Why bother when you can get on the forums and argue with your customers that recording title data is not actually a breach of privacy because you called it something else when you did it? /sarcasm
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This has been said many times before by everyone above but i’m adding my voice to the crowd so after your inbox is inundated with all of our voices you may see this is an undesired and harmful feature.
I understand the watch list is composed of people possibly using different sources but the second it may automatically include what i watched, e.g. without my interaction to consent to the disclosure it is harmful.
The idea that i have to come in and disable this feature to prevent disclosure is lunacy. There should be a server-wide setting to disable “watched status disclosure” so that if you, ie plex corp, wants to keep this feature a sever admin may choose to prevent watched status disclosure from this source.
I don’t want some of my users getting notices that my mom is watching a home movie of my kids or repeatedly watching ep1 of outlander. And I don’t want to go through the steps to tell my mom how to disable this.
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Account deleted, off to Jellyfin. byeeeeee
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Actually, that’s a lie. Never, not once, when I set up my family members to have access to my Plex server was I ever asked if I wanted to have them listed as a friend or have access to any information. I set them up years ago.
Would you like to try again and explain to us why this was enabled by default?
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Unless you’ve turned on syncing watch state then it won’t automatically include anything you’ve watched on your local (or indeed any remote) server.
Is your mum ‘friends’ on Plex with these users? If not then I don’t think that any sharing takes place between them.
inb4 the plex account delete cron job catchs up to the forum.
You are spreading disinformation. Myself, nor any of my friends opted into this. Yet I got an email showing what my friends were watching, and they got an email showing what I was watching - both with a nice big link to “show more friend activity” which had pretty much the entire watch history for us all there.
Just because you personally made some new account and it was off by default, it seems (as you can see from the many, many forum users) this was “on by default” for us existing users without an opt in. Plex opted us in automatically without user informed consent or choice. You can even see the plex employee replies in this thread stating we were all auto opted in without being asked.
This “but only if you opted in” messaging you keep spreading doesn’t apply to the vast majority of users. Dont believe me? just scroll up /\
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So I have some magic account which means I’m the only one that didn’t have to opt out of syncing my watch state? Because I’ve never changed the setting which has always been ‘inactive’ since it was introduced.
And you are again conflating two separate things. Discover Together is a separate thing to syncing watch state. They are not mutually inclusive or exclusive. I don’t disagree that the way Plex put people through the splash screen for Discover Together changed the default for some privacy settings to ‘Friends’, even if they had previously been set to ‘Private’. What it didn’t do was change the setting for sync watch state. If it’s on now then it was on before Discover Together was released. And was turned on because you turned it on.
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Unless you’ve turned on syncing watch state then it won’t automatically include anything you’ve watched on your local (or indeed any remote) server.
I’d actually like my watch status to be sync’d between devices and how i originally understood this feature to be used. e.g. watch part of a series on a TV, watch more in a airport, and all my devices have the same watch status. This is/was a helpful feature. Using this info to advertise to my friends my watching WAS NOT the understood use of this feature.
Is your mum ‘friends’ on Plex with these users? If not then I don’t think that any sharing takes place between them.
This helps a small touch but is splitting hairs. I don’t know and never thought that would be something i’d need to remotely think about because i set a server up.
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My main concern about this is that it suggests a combination of poor judgment and contempt for the users/customers that likely means there’s far worse examples of privacy invasion or voluntary data leaks that are not appearing as “features” no one ever wanted.
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Unless you’re watching items on multiple servers then syncing shouldn’t be required.
I agree, the handling of this by Plex has not been good.
Replying to agree with the OP. This is insane.
To Plex the Company (and any mods/employees who would care to pass this sentiment along);
I have been a plex user for over a decade. I have the lifetime plex pass. I’ve never posted anything about plex on any forum about anything other than a technical issue. So, you can appreciate how bad this has to be to get me to come here and write a post about it.
As far as I can tell I was never presented with the option to opt out of this feature before. I definitely never got an email (I don’t delete emails and the only emails I have from plex are login notifications). If there was something that popped up somewhere when this feature rolled out I either didn’t see it or accidentally clicked through. In any case it was not adequately explained what this feature entailed and how to opt out.
In fact, despite reading several hundred posts in topics about how to turn this feature off I still am not quite sure how to turn all these sharing features off.
I’m really baffled by why anyone thought this was a good idea. I really hope that Plex fixes this by:
- Apologizing
- Turning this off by default.
- Being much much much more clear about how this social and sharing features will work in the future
- Having much more clear privacy panel that lets you opt-in or out of any or all of these features.
- Apologizing again for good measure
I’m not going to threaten to stop using Plex or anything like that because I don’t think anyone cares because they’re not making any money from me (unless they’re making money by sharing data and/or are trying to pivot into some sort of social media ad model?). But I will be looking for other media server solutions that aren’t trying to be a shady social media company.
Do better.
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Wow.
This might be the worst feature rollout I’ve ever seen, and it’s entirely unsurprising.
As shown in a number of other threads on this forum (default max-quality streaming comes to mind), Plex has made a conscious choice that users are theirs, not yours. Every product change introduced in the last 4+ years has been designed from that perspective. Knowing this helps explain why every time a Plex representative enters one of these community threads, it seems like they completely (and intentionally) cannot understand your viewpoint, or why these changes would be frustrating.
There are plenty of reasons that make this feature rollout excellent proof of the above statement. Posts in this thread and others have detailed a number of them.
You really only need to look at the fact that the UX for privacy setting management was broken on self-hosted UI, but functional on app.plex.tv.
It’s relatively clear that this disconnect in user ownership is intentional. Support pages concerning data privacy use language that shows they know security and anonymity is incredibly important to server admins. People are very protective about their media, and I think a previous poster in this thread accurately described it as a “gray area”.
Plex knows this change makes server owners uncomfortable, but they’re making a bet. Ever since they took additional funding back in 2021, it’s been clear that they are all in on AVOD content, and think that revenue sharing will be the answer to the growth expectations that come with VC money. I’m sure they expect it to vastly exceed any Plex Pass revenue, if it doesn’t already.
My guess is that they expect this feature to drive engagement with the AVOD area of their platform. Plex licenses some content from a big tv/film studio, user gets an email that their friend watched that show, it’s not a show you have on your server so the user watches it via AVOD and Plex makes $$$.
Their bet is that they can get more users interested in this system than they will lose by admins abandoning the platform. Maybe. I’m not convinced. On its face, this feature seems an incredibly misguided effort. There’s a reason Netflix/Apple TV/any other streaming platform doesn’t do this. It has the stink of big-tech-data-harvesting-privacy-concern all over it. I’m guessing that vastly more users will be put off by the email than will be interested in any of its offerings.
People want to control what gets shared about them. They want to curate what’s shared, how it’s shared, and with who it’s shared. They want it to paint them in a positive light. When a service tracks them and does the sharing automatically it makes them feel uncomfortable, and the majority response is going to be to reduce their activity.
It’s pretty concerning that Plex doesn’t understand this. It’s an extremely well-trodden and well-understood part of software/data engineering. If you’re going to collect user activity, obtain a well-informed opt-in, do it as anonymously as possible, do it quietly, and definitely do not share it with everyone the user is connected to in a big email blast.
Regardless, Plex knows that above all else, the real value for existing admins is how similar its UX is to every other streaming platform. It turns content that would normally be inaccessible to your dad, your aunt, your less techy friends into an experience that matches every other app they already use. Plex also knows that (at least right now) users are ultimately tied to their admins. If I turn off my Plex server tomorrow, every single one of my 58 users will never open the app again. None of them consume any AVOD content. The only thing keeping admins from leaving is that the alternatives add a whole bunch of friction to the process, and that’s the one thing we care about most. The alternatives are less like the services admins want to mimic, especially in the ways that matter to our less tech-savvy users.
Plex continues to disappoint. I desperately wish this project could be open-sourced.
If I could appeal to anything, I’d say that @elan and the rest of Plex have built an amazing platform. It really is special. The ability to spin up a server and make a library of content we control accessible to friends through a sleek, familiar UX is unique and it’s what makes Plex so impressive. Please let us retain what makes that cool.
p.s. the plex representative comments attempting to paint this feature as “opt-in” are silly. everyone in this thread can see what’s happening and reason through what a proper opt-in experience should look like. just be honest with us.
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It doesn’t matter if there are ten things that use the video title or title GUID and they could be called “feature A” and “feature B to J” or some other more useful title
If a privacy policy and privacy choices say “we will not send the video title” and later one we found out that something did, then the privacy policy is breached. There is no wiggle room on that point, its a boolean choice.
I also re-iterate on behalf of myself, and those of my friends connected to our plex server. We are all users since 2010, all plex pass lifetime all have great links to the privacy industry and have all never clicked a button that says “share more data” in plex. Yet we got the email and our watching history was shared with eachother.
infact, now i think about it, this is a great way to get a userbase of non revenue generating “lifetime” users to leave of their own volition. Those are the users most likely to care about privacy.
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Really well said.
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Yes, the admin could always check watch histories, but you have to go and access them specifically, you didn’t just get them per email without wanting them.
I don’t care if my users are friends with each other, it’s none of my business and that’s precisely the point. Now I have to tell them about this new social network they involuntarily signed up to and that they have to change off a bunch of settings to avoid their watchlists getting send out by email. If they decide to share their watch history with each other, that’s on them. The problem is that the system is opt-out and not opt in.
And even if this only ever affected admins, I certainly didn’t consent to my watch history getting published either.
/thread
This feature does not add any benefit to me or my users. I’m curious what the real reason for adding such an unwanted feature would be. What I watch is personal to me. I’ve never thought to myself that all of my friends need to know I’m watching a movie or a show.
Plex does not need a “friends” feature and if you insist, Plex does not need to share anything with so called friends. Plex isn’t social networking.
As they say, stop trying to make “fetch” work.
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It is insane that they ever added this. I don’t want Plex having access to what I or my friends watch. Even regular streaming services don’t pull this kind of garbage. This feels like a paper-thin excuse to collect more data on your premium userbase, not to mention our friends and families.
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