Today I got a “Week in review” email from hello@mailout.plex.tv with a summary of what a user on my home plex server had watched. This was deeply disturbing because I never knowingly gave plex permission to send watch history from MY LOCAL MEDIA SERVER to PLEX’S CORPORATE SERVERS. I am disgusted by this breech of privacy.
My local media library is my own, I consider any metadata about it to be private information, and I DO NOT appreciate PLEX trying to use that data for monetization, marketing, or any other purposes.
Is there a way to disable ALL SHARING of media library information with the corporate plex.tv servers or am I going to have to delete PLEX and look at alternative home media server software?
SCUM BEHAVIOR by PLEX is an EXTREME under statement. I do not like the idea of having opt in set as the default, it should be the other way around. I installec PLEX to compare to Emby and have to say not impressed. Besides this adhorent behavior it looks like the PLEX server itself is always online. Was not amused installing PLEX in CachyOS to find out it was trying to access the server that’s in Garuda. Emby does not do this, in Emby the only ones that see your server are you and your users not Emby, not another instance of Emby on a secondary OS, not Emby installed on anoither local machine.
I sympathize with this, but it was presented to us all. It isn’t Opt OUT, as the very first time you log into your account after this change you had the opportunity to uncheck these boxes before anything happened.
A big issue with it is that those boxes came pre-checked. If you blindly clicked through the prompt without reading what it asked of you, then you “opted in” to it. It’s like claiming that newsletters are Opt-out, when really all you did was fail to uncheck the “YES! Sign me up for your newsletter!” when creating an account on a site.
Those of you saying that users can just opt out and that we should have opted out are missing the point. This should be a server level setting not a user one. This is MY PLEX SERVER we’re talking about, and a user shouldn’t be able to send data about MY SERVER to plex corporation WITHOUT MY CONSENT.
Additionally, this choice was not presented to me. I have not logged into my account since this change happened so I was unaware of the need to opt out, and there was no indication on the Manage Library Access screen when I invited a new user that they would have to opt out either.
This data sharing was a sleazy move by plex, and I hope they get sued for it.
A user is not really sending data about your server.
All what is in these data is this: “User X watched movie Y.”
It does not say “User X watched movie Y on the Plex server of user Z.”
There are a number of ways how user X can create such a “watched” event.
It is not exclusive to watching videos on your server.
each full plex.tv account can potentially access shared media from different plex servers, belonging to different plex users. It is not stored or mentioned from which of these servers the title was watched.
Each full plex.tv account can use the streaming media which are offered by plex.tv
If a movie is watched on there, it creates the exact same “watched” event. Again, it is not stored or mentioned how and where the title was watched.
The user could have used their Watchlist or https://watch.plex.tv to look up a movie or show and mark it as “watched”. This will also generate a “watched” event. In this case as well it is not stored or mentioned that it was simply marked as “watched”. It will look like all the other “watched” events in the user’s playback History.
So, there is no clear path from the user’s playback history to the contents of your server.
