Plex can claim they were always labeled as friends, but really before all this stuff they were just shares. as pointed out.
Yes, I am well aware you can now unfriend them to get rid of this nonsense. But that only became available once the new features were released.
It would have been more sensible to provide the option to split friends from shares before rolling out the rest of these ‘features’ and to announce the features in advance with a timeframe, so at least then we could have had time to make the changes before it was rolled out.
I had a friend reach about my plex watch habits. why are my users getting copies / notices of things I watch?(i’m the owner) I too opted out of all of these and they were re-opted into today without my consent
So, I’ve had Discover and Sync turned off…and everything else for that matter since they came out (well, I think sync was on briefly when first introduced and then quickly went off).
I got the email about friend activity which got me wondering who my friends are…
I had to turn on Discover Source.
Then I found everyone is my friends because I invited them to my server. Okay, got it.
Edit: I found they can be edited via plex.tv/web and then user icon in top right > My Profile > then little icons next to “My Watchlist” and “My ratings”. Amazingly that Account Visibility option is set to Anyone by default and has no option to set it to Nobody.
If, like me, you never really access Plex via plex.tv all this stuff will have been completely invisible. Thankfully they sent that email out and showed me what they were doing.
Thanks blim5001. I found it elsewhere in the end but good to know it’s there too. I was looking via my local install, not via plex.tv. It never even occurs to me to access Plex via plex.tv so I’d completely missed it.
To be very clear up front, the feature is designed so that Plex does not know what content may be located on a personal Plex Media Server. That’s important for our users and it’s important for us
At the same time, you have a log of all my watched content and a log of all my IP addresses, so to me that seems near-as-makes-no-difference like a database of my content and the locations in which it is stored.
To be clear, I do not want my “Plex account” to store ANY data about my content at all (that being the entire point of self-hosting your own stuff.). How can I assured that data will not be stored?
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So, did this bug mean that Plex just shared all my data with my “friends” even though I didn’t want it to be? (I had Discover and everything else “disabled” when Plex implemented this feature.)
I came straight here after getting the ‘week in review’ email, glad that everyone is raising hell about this. I self host specifically so that I maintain control of the data, I don’t want social media features or friends getting adverts about what I’m watching. I just want a self hosted server that I can add individual family accounts to, no streaming service, no tidal music, none of the numerous other BS ‘features’ you keep trying to cram into it.
I get that you need to diversify and get new users, but as a lifetime pass holder it’s deeply frustrating to have to dig into profiles and change privacy settings when the whole point is that it’s supposed to be private to start with.
How do you completely disable the Discover features, is there a guide somewhere I’ve missed? Or do I just need to start completely blocking all Plex traffic out of my network?
