What data do you gather from local servers? And stuff about trust

General Discussions
1

I’m new to Plex, and am protective of the privacy of the content on my local Plex server. I have some questions regarding that.

I have a variety of TV shows and Movies all in a single folder structure on my local Plex server.
However, I noticed that when I created the TV and Movie libraries it somehow recognized which content belonged in which library. Do you use your own central service to match content against your own database for this purpose? If not, how did you distinguish the two?

Do you use any data from my local server for any of your central services? We love you, but how do we trust that this is the case? I’m a techie guy (software dev) so would love techie details about this please.

Are there any Plex features I should avoid, or use in a particular way, in order to maintain privacy of my local content?

Thanks for your support for this awesome utility.

2

I do not know the technical details, but they have reassured us repeatedly that they do not know what files we have, and they do not want to know. I assume is it simply an unauthenticated anonymous API connection to look up content and we have to trust that they are not logging our IP addresses and figuring out what is in our libraries over time.

I have never seen a technical explanation, perhaps someone else has and can post a link.

As a side note I really really suggest you look at Plex’s file organization rules and set up your folders that way. If you do not, then sooner or later matching will break, and you will come here and ask “why isn’t Temptation Island Season 2 matching correctly when seasons 1 and 3 are OK,” and someone will say, “show us your folder structure and file names,” and you’ll post a screen shot, and you’ll be told “it’s your folder structure, fix it,” and they will post a link to the same page I did, and you’ll say, “but it always worked before,” and someone else will say, “and you were just lucky that it worked before,” and fixing then it will be more work than fixing it now.

3

Great suggestion, thanks. I recently switched from using Kodi, which uses a different convention of course. But it seems (so far) like Plex will work out better for me for a variety of reasons (mostly ubiquity of clients), so maybe it’s worth making the change.

Thanks again

4

I used Kodi for a long long long time, even while I had a lifetime Plex Pass… Kodi was just habit. But once I switched, I was really glad I did. Plex is not perfect but you will enjoy it.

The keys to happiness are:

  • Follow the instructions, like folder structure and file naming.
  • If a feature or fix you want is missing, report it here and ask about workarounds… But you just gotta roll with it, Plex does not share their roadmap. They are pretty good about fixing core bugs, though.

Welcome aboard!