Because of this:
The document referenced in the post:
https://support.plex.tv/articles/sync-watch-state-and-ratings/
It was already explained above. Plex doesn’t know where or how you watched a certain title. It only knows that you watched it.
So the contents of any of the Plex servers which you own (or to which you have access) cannot be deduced from the “watch history”.
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Sorry, I missed that bit earlier. So what I’m gathering is that, so long as I have “sync watched state and ratings” turned off, Plex has no idea what I’m watching. And they don’t know what’s in my media library no matter what. Is that correct?
One important thing I still don’t understand, though: there’s a separate set of privacy settings in my Plex user profile page (that confusingly I can only access via the plex.tv website and not through the UI in the Plex desktop app my app) (app was out of date) that let’s me decide whether friends are able to see what I’ve been watching, my ratings, and such. If I grant them this permission, how can they have any access to that information if “sync watched state and ratings” is turned off?
That is correct.
That’s a very good point! I will forward this to improve the user interface in this regard.
That being said, I can edit those privacy settings just fine in Plex for Desktop. Are you perhaps using Plex HTPC or some older or 3rd-party Plex client?
Or did you perhaps disable updates of Plex for Desktop?
I do hope that the answer is that the feature is broken with “sync watched state and ratings” turned off, and not that there’s another avenue in which Plex can have access to that data without users realizing it!
I think a lot of this debacle could have been fixed by much, much better UI. Something that the Plex team should consider is making it clear in the UI when a setting involves sending potentially sensitive information to Plex’s servers — which always includes the titles of items they’re watching or titles that could potentially come from their library, regardless of how those titles are sent to Plex’s servers, regardless of whether Plex knows they’re coming from the user’s library. A lot of us are rightly angry because we didn’t realize what we were telling Plex to do, because it wasn’t clear. And a lot of us got opted in to stuff we didn’t want.
Someone in all of this has surely received an email telling them that a friend or family member watched something that friend or family member didn’t want public, like porn. It’s very worrying that no one at Plex thought of that when implementing this feature. If it were me rolling this out, the only way I would ever have considered it ethical is with a clear opt-in and accompanying bolded text telling the user “This will send emails to your friends and family informing them of what you’re watching.”
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I had disabled automatic updates, and my client was out of date. Now that I’ve updated I can access those settings.
It’s not broken – it’s disabled, yes.
Not many, though. Because Plex does only store a history of “matched” media. So that “pr0n” should be listed on IMDb or TheMovieDB. And many pr0n titles are either not listed there at all.
Some users of Plex for adult purposes use metadata delivered by custom metadata agents. And those custom metadata agents are not compatible with the watch history.
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I was just reminded that these friends can still see what you watched on plex.tv as on-demand video, and what you marked manually as “watched”.
So while they cannot see your activity on your personal Plex server(s), they can see what you did on your universal Watchlist and on https://watch.plex.tv
If you don’t want that, you better set access to your profile page to “private”.
Sure, but the UI for it was not disabled, so it could mislead the user into thinking the feature was enabled when really it’s not. But that of course is a different issue.
That’s good, and this may very well calm down a few people who had a near heart attack thinking that their mom may have just gotten an email with an itemized list of all of the porn they’ve been watching in their Plex library. Even so though, someone unwittingly told Plex to let people know they were watching something they didn’t want people to know they were watching, like Baby Geniuses 2.
(Not me, though. I want everyone to know I’ve seen that movie.)
Automatically making me friends with people and then sharing what they watch with me and what I watch with them is so far beyond acceptable that it’s almost funny. Absolutely shocking behaviour Plex. This has really rocked my trust in this product. If I wasn’t a lifetime pass holder I’d be cancelling immediately. Mind boggling. Utterly insane behaviour. Seriously. Wtf?
I’ll clarify, unlike some here my issue is not with the data being collected. It’s that it’s being shared with “friends” that Plex decided to force upon me (and me upon them) and without warning, notice or permission. That’s a MASSIVE and unacceptable invasion of privacy. It’s utterly unacceptable to automatically make someone my friend in the first place, but to then share my watch history with them? Insane. Is Plex feeling suicidal? I defend Plex a lot but even I cannot begin to defend this madness.
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Insanity. Utter insanity. Why would Plex think this was acceptable?
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Again, no-one is made your Plex friend without your involvement.
People with whom you have shared your media have always been your Plex friends.
Actually it used to be a prerequisite to be friends with a user, in order to be able to share your media with him/her.
It has been like that for years.
Now you have the ability to handle “media sharing” and “Plex friendship” separately.
In turn that means that nobody with whom you did not share your media before is now automatically your Plex friend.
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I’m sorry but that’s just not true. I just had to go into the Friends section and remove every single person I share my server with. These are people who I was sharing with before Friends existed. When did this friends nonsense even every start? I know I never once ticked a box when adding users that also made them my friends. There wasn’t even a list of friends until very recently, so how can I have been adding friends, exactly? Adding someone to my server =/= me saying they’re my friend.
At worst what you just said is a deliberate lie. At best it’s deeply disingenuous.
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These were your Plex friends before. I explained that above already.
Inviting them to your server made them your friend.
As I said, the distinction between sharees and friends did not really exist before.
But it does now.
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They weren’t my friends. They were people I shared my server with. PLEX made them my friends, WITHOUT my involvement. There was no such thing as “Friends” when I invited them. Spin this all you want, it’s utterly unacceptable. I’ve never even heard of any other company automatically making people friends with each other without consent.
I just had to disable a ton of stuff I would have happily left turned on before this. Now I need to trawl through all my Plex settings and see what other fast ones Plex is trying to pull.
My trust in Plex is utterly shaken.
Guess I’ll be sending off a complaint to the ICO. @OttorKerner Please point me to the correct email to send my official complaint about this to Plex so their response can be included in my complaint to the ICO.
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This is such a dumb response. NO ONE asked for this.
Stuff like this needs to be OPT in FULL STOP.
A series of people need to be fired over this. We are also due a 3rd party validation that this sort of data is deleted in a secure manner.
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My friend whatsapp’d me two screenshots, one of a movie to rate that I had just watched. And a second screenshot of an email HE received of a TV show I am currently watching.
He a long time ago shared access to his library but I never shared mine, and is a “friend” on Plex.
How is it possible that he gets personal information of mine?
Surely this is a legal matter and should have serious ramifications to do with GDPR.
Worst of all Plex doesn’t let you directly contact them regarding a serious breach such as this.
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No, you can do those things separately. While in many cases when you give or receive access to a library you’ll also want to be friends, it’s possible to have library access without being friends in Plex. Similarly, you can be friends and not have access to any Plex Media Server library.
Your own support pages note the inherent difference between sharing a library and being a friend. The distinction didn’t exist before because there were not friends, only sharees.
Again, no-one is made your Plex friend without your involvement.
This is just flat out untrue. All my sharees were made my friends without my involvement at some point recently, and Plex absolutely recognises that one being a sharee does not automatically mean they’re a friend.
So this is, indeed, just flat out untrue.
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Im done with Plex, I have already contact the EU data protection supervisor and will be deleting my install. So much for privacy and no one from Plex can understand why everyone is livid at this move or others. Its the same pattern repeated over and over. LTT was right, should have deleted this app then.
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Completely mental isnt it?
I’m considering this too, what a complete joke.
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