There was a time where Plex explicitly stated that they don’t know what we watch on our servers, and they didn’t want to know. It seems that this has changed.
I’m not enirely opposed to the idea of Discover Together. Trakt had been a thing for years for a reason. However, I do have concerns about how much info Plex collects.
Plex does get a certain percentage of their income from studios via the ad-supported streaming platform; so it’s in Plex’s best interests to keep the studios at least somewhat happy.
So, I’m curious exactly which info Plex stores on their own servers. Time watched, and name of movie/episode seems to be a given. It’s less clear whether it differentiates between streamed or locally stored media. What about streaming devices transcoding info… Or filenames?
From what I’ve heard, the only thing that is recorded would be the unique ID of a movie or show. Think of it like the IMDB ID of an item, that is it. Since you can mark a movie/show as watched while just browsing their metadata service or using the Discover feature, there is plausibility that you are using it as a kind of “checkmark” for media you watched on other services.
I believe that they don’t upload any other info, such as resolution/codec/audio-track/etc, only whether a media item has been watched or not.
All the above is info that Plex themselves promise. I would imagine anything else captured by Plex would have been sniffed out by other people by now.
That’s something I’m curious on too, and I also can’t help being cynical on it considering how data and privacy are treated by countless other companies.
The part that keeps gnawing at me on all of this is that not everything is visible to the user when the feature is first shown.
That singular missing and buried setting is also the most important one, and it defaults to “Anyone”.
Everything should default to “Private” or “Friends Only”, with the user being the one to change it to something more public.
While they already detail the types of data they do and don’t collect for the rest of Plex (it’s in their Privacy Policy, do recommend reading it), there’s nothing in there yet about what Discover would collect. But they do also state they collect data for advertisers, and social media platforms (which Discover appears to aim to want to be) are typically goldmines for those groups.
Hi all. This is a great question and one that not just our users are concerned with. We take this very seriously and it is always in the forefront of any new feature discussions. @Justina_plex and @xSean have also provided some great links to more information (Privacy Policy and Sync Watch State).
Let me reiterate - we still don’t know, and this hasn’t changed. This is very clearly called out in our Privacy Policy:
Plex does not collect:
Content titles of your Personal Content.
If this feels like it isn’t directly addressing the concern here, then let me try and connect those dots. The watched history for your account does not collect any identifying information regarding source - therefore it doesn’t know if you watched something in a theater and manually marked it, or if it came from the Sync Watch State feature, or if it was imported from somewhere else. This was deliberate in the design. It is a feature for you to use how you want to - so if you want to go crazy and try and mark every movie ever made as watched - go for it!
