According to the new Facebook “Off-Facebook Activity tool,” Plex is sharing my Plex activities with Facebook, despite me never having set it to do any such thing.
Can someone explain why this is?
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And this is why I have NO social media accounts
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Thank for reporting. As far as I know that info should not be passed to Facebook. I am waiting for some people to start their day but it looks like it may be an issue with the Facebook API for the Facebook login, but I’m not sure till I can get some more info from folks who are not online yet and give them time to investigate.
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Just to be clear: I deliberately don’t use my FB login to log in to Plex and it still passed the info to FB.
Why am I not surprised at all?!?!
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Excellent question. One I’d also like the answer to.
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To be clear I am not an expert, but as far as I know this is how it works:
Everytime a site puts a “Like” or “Share on Facebook” button on their website, it loads the Facebook API, and all of the data collected listed above is completely standard for that. How do they know it was you? Facebook cookies. If you are are logged into FB or have the “Remember me” option, the API can access the FB cookie and that’s how they know which account to link the data to. Now to be fair, I have checked the plex.tv and my server site, and the Facebook cookies are not loaded, so it probably is a misconfiguration for the login.
Again, this is how it works as far as I know. It could be completely wrong, so take it with a grain of salt.
For what it’s worth… I turned this off using the Facebook setting, and later had to log in again when I opened app.plex.tv yesterday, even though I’m very sure I used my mail as the login for Plex. Very strange.
Same here. I specifically DO NOT use FB login with Plex, but somehow plex is in my activity feed on FB. Does this mean that Plex shares my e-mail with FB so they can cross reference it? I pay a bloody monthly fee to you guys and you still harvest data and give it to FB.
I’m absolutely not amused to see Plex show up in my FB data. Please let me know how to block this from happening in the future.
I pay a monthly fee to Plex, because I like plex and don’t believe a lifetime pay is viable in the end.
I get that when a product is ‘free’, I’m the actual product. But Plex is not free to me, so I should not be a product.
I expect plex devs to explain that paying users’ data is not shared, or worse, sold, or explain a way to completely block this.
Otherwise it’s bye bye Plex.
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You can block it on Facebook.
Facebook–>Settings–>Your Facebook Information–>Off-Facebook Activity–>View–>Clear History
That will get rid of what they have saved for (for all apps/websites) you thus far. If you also click (from the page you landed at when you clicked “View”) “Manage Your Off-Facebook Activity,” you can also set it not to continue to harvest such information in the future.
There are more fine-grained controls if, say, you only want to stop Plex from sharing your activities but not all the other apps/websites that have shared your “activities.”
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I turned this off yesterday, and found a couple apps that I had forgot used ‘facebook login’.
So perhaps some of you did at some point link to FB (could have been an accidental click) and then forgotten about it.
Looking at my “off Facebook activity” it seems this is a Facebook issue harvesting sites we visit, similar to Google. I could not believe the activity collected, it’s outrageous.
All turned off now and deleted history, Thanks banjopotato.
I will be checking Google settings next
If you go to the page on FB where you manage Off-Facebook Activity, it says this:
What is off-Facebook activity?
Off-Facebook activity includes information that businesses and organizations share with us about your interactions with them.
This suggests that the “active” role is played by the “businesses and organizations” (e.g., Plex) that “share” the information. It does not suggest that FB is just harvesting willy-nilly. However, there’s pretty much zero reason to believe that FB doesn’t do exactly that, so who knows?
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anytime you see a “like” or ‘share this on facebook’ or similar link, that generally means that page is potentially sending information to facebook/google/snapchat/twitter/etc.
there are various addons/plugins that will block those social media links.
Thank you. But we know FaceBook likes to harvest the crap out of everything, my problem is with Plex just allowing that and not being clear on how to completely shut it off on my server.
Also: what is in it for Plex?
I was also very concerned to see this. Plex is sharing more activity with Facebook than any other site/app listed in my account. I’ve never associated my Facebook account with Plex, and I use different email addresses for both accounts. If Plex is sharing my activity with Facebook, I have to assume they’re sharing it with other third parties as well. I aggressively block ad trackers in my browser, so it’s got to be Plex sharing this data directly. I’ve opted out of every kind of data sharing Plex allows me too, so they really shouldn’t be doing this.
I don’t just want Facebook to delete this information, I want Plex to stop sharing my activity and data with third parties. Good companies don’t do this.
I’d wager a strong bet that this comes directly from having the Plex app installed on your cell. Not browsing a website, etc. You can’t control a damn thing on cellphones in regards to data sharing.
I downloaded the data and this is 100% coming from the mobile app.
I used to have the Plexapp installed on my android device but if started drawing an insane amount of background power for some reason so i uninstalled it a couple of months ago.
Sifting through the facebook data show me that the data collection stopped right about when I removed the app.
The information looks like this:
| ID | 1405987639482438 |
|---|---|
| Event | CUSTOM |
| Received on | 14 October 2019 at 13:12 |
| ID | 1405987639482438 |
| Event | ACTIVATE_APP |
| Received on | 9 October 2019 at 11:18 |
| ID | 1405987639482438 |
| Event | CUSTOM |
| Received on | 4 September 2019 at 19:26 |
| ID | 1405987639482438 |
| Event | CUSTOM |
| Received on | 3 September 2019 at 09:18 |
| ID | 1405987639482438 |
| Event | ACTIVATE_APP |
| Received on | 30 August 2019 at 19:06 |
I don’t know what the ID is but it seems that every app that reports in has a unique ID.
Seems to be mostly meta data, not sure to what use this is so i think there might be more here that is not revealed.
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