Yeah you do. Turn off ‘Sync watch state’ and/or change your watch history privacy setting to ‘private’. Either one should do.
Exactly! And the dialog in plex regarding enabling sync does NOT say anything about it being used for social purposes.
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This also simply feel like a bad UI choice. The last place I would look for privacy settings would be a tiny icon next to history. I would expect these kind of personal preferences to be have their own section within my Account Settings. I see there’s even a Privacy section already at the bottom of that page but it only pertains to Opt-out of Targeted Ads and data sharing to Plex partners (which should also probably be something people would prefer to be opt-in rather than opt-out).
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The iOS app is great I don’t have any issues with it. The Roku app works fine. No bells or whistles but completely functional. I haven’t tested on Apple TV yet but if all else fails infuse works with jellyfin. Really the clients aren’t bad.
Swiftfin for iOS is also great if you are just trying to watch things.
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So convoluted. If all these settings are linked to sharing data between users, they should have ALL been combined in a single section under our Account Settings page. A few are on that page itself, but they are all under different sections and could be assumed that they are unrelated to one another.
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Can we also all acknowledge how stupid the sync state/watch state stuff even is to begin with? The setting doesn’t even explain what the heck it’s necessary for and I’m sure a lot of people turned it on like me because they thought it was required for basic Plex functionality, like Continue Watching and the like. And it says nothing about this privacy BS.
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Having read this, I can positively say I never saw this anywhere.
The fact you think people are going to sit and read all this text when they open their Plex to watch something is concerning, do you really think that? And saying “oh it’s their fault then” doesn’t cut it in the GDPR age where opt-in is the legal default.
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This is the description for that setting:
“Keep your watch state and ratings in sync across the entire Plex platform! This includes movies and shows you watch on Plex Media Servers as well as anything you stream from Plex.”
To many people, including myself, I’m sure they understood this as syncing across devices. I doubt a majority of casual users are watching content from multiple servers for that part to make sense to them.
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Why? It doesn’t mention anything about devices either in that description, the fuller description you can get to clicking ‘Learn more’, or the support article linked to in that fuller description. It only mentions syncing data across servers you have access to, the discover feature, and Plex’s own streaming service. It doesn’t even make sense for devices using the same account and the same server to have different watch states.
Also, syncing watch state is a relatively new feature. There were many years before it’s introduction where you could access a single server from multiple devices and the watch status was the same across all of them.
I doubt most casual users have even found the sync watch feature or turned it on. Even if they have they’re likely to only have one ‘friend’ which is the admin of whichever server they share content from, and that person has already been getting details of their watch history for a long time now.
Why do we have Watch History if we also disabled Sync Status.
Where does Watch History come from?
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One other thing that I don’t believe I’ve seen mentioned about these screens/modals that people can easily bypass if they don’t understand them or simply didn’t pay attention:
Yes hypothetically, if I happened to want to opt-in so that my friends (if they so desired) could manually visit my user/social profile and see a few stats like watchlists or ratings, then cool.
But NOWHERE in these screens does it mention that a Weekly Newsletter would be emailed directly to everyone with this information. I get that I would have “agreed” to this Discover feature, but the email aspect was not mentioned whatsoever.
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Just like your last post, again, the issue here is Friends. You should not have created a bunch of Friends for people based on their server shares. It was not like that in the Beta, so people’s experience with this feature was totally different when it went to production and you added a bunch of people to their Friends list without them knowing.
You need to delete the Friends you created without users knowing.
I know that server shares were sometimes referred to as friends and it seemed like a good idea to migrate them to Friends when social profiles released, but that was a bad idea. Friend creation/addition needs to be a manual, intentional, informed step that the user takes, especially now that the relationship implies sharing watch activity.
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This is a horrible feature and needs to be removed from the platform immediately. I did not sign up for a plex pass to have them become a personal nark with my personal media watching habits.
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I just want my voice to be heard. I don’t want “friends” or Plex deciding what info users can see, or history shared in any way. At least realize it was hard to know what people were being asked to accept. It seems pretty obvious small changes were made that slowly added up to what we have now, and people are reasonably upset about it. If you gave ME the option of sending some form of recommendation email, or get something set up as like a forum just for the server that ONLY I am in charge of, that might be different, but I’m sure there’s no money in that so it won’t ever happen.
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It was not initially in the beta but was added back in July due to folks wanting to unfriend specific individuals. It was the same time we added Mute & Block.
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Why would you want to disable the sync of watch state?
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Why are you only acknowledging the least important part of my post? The technicality that it wasn’t originally in the beta but was added later is irrelevant.
It isn’t about the fact that the split was done, but about how it was done. Even if we assume that Plex users were aware that server shares = friends (and that’s a big if, my guess is that Plex employees use that name internally and it bled into an assumption that everyone knows server shares are friends, in reality for users it is very poorly communicated through the UX); you can’t just add a new massively invasive permission to an existing relationship without asking the user.
To explain this another way, imagine if tomorrow Instagram released “Friends”. These Friends could scroll through a list of every interaction you ever made, every post you ever sent to anyone, every comment, like, etc. And, they made it so that everyone you follow is added to your Friends, automatically, without notifying you.
Users would throw a riot (kind of like what’s happening in this thread…). There are plenty of people I follow who I would not want to have this “Friend” relationship with. Doing it automatically would be a massive invasion of privacy.
You need to remove the Friends migrated from server shares. When you split the two, you should have retained the list of server shares, and given us a blank Friends list.
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It doesn’t really matter why someone would want to sync watch status , but it should be clear and honour that choice.
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Continuing the discussion from Discover Together: Public Release:
At least they have finally confirmed they are collection your data for their own needs. While we might have suspected this was the case, to my knowledge with regard to watch/rating habits, they have not written it down before for everyone to see.
BTW, can’t remember if I posted this already. However, if you have shared your libraries with friends then search your logs for ViewStateSync. You may see something like this …
... DEBUG - [Req#20f244/ViewStateSync] Got token for user 123456 (blahblahbah)
... DEBUG - [Req#20f244/ViewStateSync] Starting for user 123456
... DEBUG - [Req#20f244/ViewStateSync] Sending state
... DEBUG - [Req#20f244/ViewStateSync] All state sent
This is your server doing a sync against the plex cloud for user 123456. The blahblahbah is the users name so you can then take action and ask them to disable sync and if they won’t then you can remove their access from your server. Extreme, maybe but our data is important to us.
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