I don’t believe Plex ‘knows’ where the media your friends watched is stored (if anywhere). It could as easily be something from your server, or another server they have access to, or something from Plex’s own ‘channels’, or something they had marked as watched after seeing it on a completely different provider.
Not that any of that addresses the bigger question of why this was thought to be a good idea…
It shouldn’t matter if you’re up to date or not. If you’ve not been through the dialogs to accept sharing, it shouldn’t have been set to share to “Friends” (or persons granted access to your library).
Honestly I wouldn’t have cared even if it was set to friends. What’s got me so worked up is that it did that and didn’t give me control over who my friends even were. I had to first discover about the email when a sharee contact me, then discover the settings were only on plex.tv, then discover where they were, then UNFRIEND everyone I ever shared my server with, not one of which I actively chose to friend.
So how would one on an old client declare “Do not share my activity to my ‘friends’” ?
Take a REAL good look Plex. You screwed up big time with this one. Not only does it blow my mind there are morons working there that thought this was a good idea but to continue defending it and doing a piss poor job of it… I wish I could fire those responsible personally.
You guys are ruining what has become so dear to so many people. You are becoming a dumpster fire just like twitter did. STOP with the ■■■■ features and changes that NO ONE asked for or wanted. Get Plex back to what it was originally meant to be and great at. Fix the bugs, work on features that have actually been requested that make sense.
This is either absolute ■■■■ management forcing good devs to kill the product, or just a lost team out of touch with the buyers. No excuses anymore.
It’s for your entire account.
Plex is claiming the data they are collecting does not reveal what is on your server. It is somewhat true, but I have my personal concerns about how easy it might be to figure with a high probability what is on your server based on usage behavior patterns…especially when A.I. comes into the picture at some point.
I learnt a long while ago when plex initially forced the whole discover stuff on us that if you care about privacy you NEED to 1) monitor this forum, 2) keep a very close eye on ALL release notes and 3) read very carefully ALL announcements from plex.
Pretty much everything being raised on this thread today I raised over a week ago when this new social rubbish was announced. Plex will opt you in, that’s the direction from their leadership and they make it hard to disable by putting stuff all over the place rather than in one location. You have email preferences, online media sources, account settings and now also profile settings.
BTW, why do I even have a profile? I don’t want one, I did not agree to plex creating one for me and I cannot even delete it. Best I can do is make some of it private (visibility can’t be set to private, friends only which I don’t like). I have an account, I don’t want a profile.
Also… be careful with sync watch/rating. That CANNOT be disabled, only set inactive which is a very different thing. If it was active at any point in time it will have sent all your watch and rating data to plex and setting this to inactive to my knowledge does not delete it. They have it!
Also, folks… I DON’T BLAME THE PLEX TEAM, especially those on the forum trying to help folks with this. This is a management and company direction problem and I do hope it changes.
After disabling watch sync, how can I clear my Plex.tv profile watch history without clearing the watch history on my server (without having to delete the entries one by one)?
I am pretty sure if you delete items from your watch history on your profile page, it does not delete them from the play history pages in the dashboard
I deleted all mine from my profile page, but the servers watch history is still there. (If that is what you mean)
But you can only delete them from the watch history one by one unless you script something.
Sorry, I missed that bit
Of note, deleting entries from the watch history does not change the counters above the Watched since joining Plex So Plex are obviously still keeping some info…
I have way too many episodes to practically do it one by one.
I wish there was at least a select multiple button.
I’m seeing the same where deleting a movie from watch history does not change the movie watch counter.
This option should be off by default. I was not aware this information was being collected, processed, and disseminated. This feels like an extreme breach of trust and privacy.
Is there more information about this change, how the data is stored/processed, and how we can request it be deleted permanently? If Plex does not support purging ALL customer data then I would like a check on the what I can reverse, as I paid for your services which do not include or disclose this level of data collection and exposure.
I swear it was a base option years ago to block all this, any and all collection by anything, by default when setting up a server too! Maybe that was a plug in now lost to time and greed.
Am I the only one who didn’t know how to find these items?
How about this?
This appears to have happened to me as well. Everything was on for emails without any change from me.
Ok so from what I can tell if you want to get some of this under control check these out.
https://www.plex.tv/email-preferences/ and uncheck “Email me a summary of my friends activity” Maybe encourage your friends to do the same.
https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile Click the little dude and open up the window and change it to preference, probably private.
Don’t forget to go into your account settings and uncheck Watch state and ratings sync also.
dataprotection@plex.tv
Oh and a link to the pages JaysPlex7 mentioned above https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/privacy-preferences/#opd
https://www.plex.tv/vendors-us/
That is all I have in me for the moment. There are a bunch of links at the top of the page. I am sure you’ll get it sorted. Good luck to us all.
I can’t believe you’ve done this…
Are you serious? Really? Like… Really? I’m regretting my lifetime Plex pass now. You barely, barely introduced this new sharing feature, gave folks practically no time to opt out, and instead opted everyone in by default? You didn’t explain what these features would do, how they would interact with your sync feature, and then about a week later you go and automatically opt every single subscriber into a mailing list without telling them. That mailing list then goes and emails EVERYONE, client, server host, freemium content viewer, what others are watching? You’re absurd, this is absurd. As others have pointed out, your automatic opting in to these mailing lists is almost certainly a violation of GDPR laws, and I’d imagine the California AG would like a word or two as well… Will Plex be issuing an apology for mismanaging this rollout? Will we be getting any assurances that further privacy violations like this wont happen again? You’ve severely damaged your reputation here, and you are going to have a lot of loyal fans migrating to that other service as a result.
I think I figured out how to lower the count. You have to mark it unmatched before you remove it. Marking it unmatched looks to lower the count.
No idea what that might mean in terms of what data might be left over after removing it.
Well… that aint great… and while I get where the idea came from “aka increase engagement with paid parts” and “promoting social interactions” making it opt out really was not a great idea. I guess a decade of use is quite good, not yet the straw that would break the camels back, but camel sure is quite exhausted and competition is not that far behind in terms of client support nowdays…
Not sure how successful the extra functionality has been, and I get the need for a revenue stream, but I sure do not like the general direction things have been heading past couple years.
Not a fan of these “features”. Exploring alternatives.
https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/online-media-sources
All of this is not set like I expected. Half of these are new to me. Since when was this defaulted to the opposite of privacy?
If you disable sync retroactively, that is, after you spammed everyone people’s personal watch history, do you go and delete previous watch history? If not, how do we request Plex to delete our past watch history?
