Thanks for confirming.
Plex should update their Privacy Preferences page. There is no mention of Facebook there.
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/privacy-preferences/
I find it disturbing that Plex makes so much contact with Facebook despite not providing any details about my Facebook account. If it has to do with the Google advertiser ID then they should make it clearer there is communication with Facebook in the background regardless of login method, and allow turning it off in the app.
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I’ll take Plex at face value that they didn’t intend for that data to be collected. With Facebook being such a data vacuum machine, its very believable.
That being said, IF Plex didn’t fix the app, the privacy controls in Facebook are actually more concerning. Even if you tell them to turn off future activity from the app, they’ll still get data from the app?
This is a knock on Facebook, not on Plex (assuming they are sincere in fixing the mobile apps to not send such information in the first place).
The information being reported was anonymous and limited to activity around app launches and app installs. It was being reported for all users whether or not they use the Sign in with Facebook feature. It did not include information about your media library or viewing behavior, and Plex did not report any additional personal details associated with these events. We encourage you to review the information Facebook collects about you from third-party apps and control how it’s collected and used in the future on Facebook’s Off-Facebook Activity settings page.
I am confused. How possibly can the information be anonymous when apparently the Facebook site lists it associated with a particular user? What does the phrase “to activity around app launches and app installs” mean, which apps and which installs. I made the deliberate decision not to have - and will likely never have - a Facebook account. How is it justifiable that Plex reports information about me to Facebook? As I do not have the means to check on Facebook’s web site, I feel Plex should provide me the information what is stored about me.
For users that haven’t signed in with Facebook on Plex, we cannot link their activity to a specific Facebook account, but Facebook can (assuming they actually have a FB account). For a user with no Facebook account then the information would be sent to FB but there would be no way for them to associate it with a specific person.
We’re not storing this info ourselves and we didn’t explicitly report it to FB. The FB library we use for authentication was reporting it to FB automatically.
Then please do something to stop FB from receiving such info when FB is NOT used to log into plex
We are as mentioned in the announcement linked above
Are you at all concerned with the GDPR implications of this? I’m a citizen and resident of the European Union and you’ve effectively transmitted personally-identifying information of mine to a third party without my explicit consent. I never opted in to your sharing of this information and you never gave me an opportunity to opt out. Seems to me you’ve handled this in a way that puts you in violation of the regulation. This is a data breach for which the penalties (per case) are prohibitive. As in: enough to bankrupt your company. See this for example.
I would sincerely hate to see that happen to Plex, because I like your product. But, seriously, how could you have let this happen?
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Thank you. Sorry I posted before catching up on all the postings in the thread
I too is a citizen of the EU, and yes, you are correct that Plex did, unwillingly, due to a bad FB plugin, pass info that referred to you as a person, defined by FB.
When said, the info “leaked” was:
- you have a Plex account
- You installed a Plex App
- You launched a Plex App
I 100% agree with you here, that this info should never ever have been leaked to FB, but sadly, when FB, as dominant as they are, release an SDK for 3.Party, one would trust them in what they say the SDK does…
In this case, well…
(And according to Plex, they are now looking into every 3.Party SDK they use, in order to check if others are doing the same)
And above is how I see things right now, with the limited info I got so far, and what happens to be identical to the info you have!
So all in all, what The FB SDK Spy leaked, is IMHO, and I deal with GDPR on a daily basis, not enough to raise concern, and since Plex seams to handle this both as a high priority issue, nothing to be alarmed about, since no info was leaked about what you where doing with Plex, nor what you might have stored on your Plex Server.
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How exactly do you know that the information was limited to this?
This is really bad! there is nothing mentioned in the User agreement. i didn’t login in with my FB acc. always use my Plex account to gain access… and now there is “plex data” in my FB acc.
and i don’t use the FB app, only gains access through the Browser…
the EU has laws against this, this can be bad for Plex Inc…
This… ‘For a user with no Facebook account then the information would be sent to FB but there would be no way for them to associate it with a specific person…’ is truly shocking.
I’ve no FB account, never have and never will but now they could have some data from me which I did not authorise. This is cowboy stuff…
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If you’re a FB user, it might be an idea to bring the off-FB activity tool to the attention of your FB friends as well. SPREAD THE WORD. FB should be held accountable for such underhanded tactics. You would think they would have woken up after the misappropriation of digital assets arising from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Actually, I don’t but was based on screendumps from users
Because if you have a FB account, you can download the data that they actually have. If you read @supergregg’s post above, you can see an example of what is there. Essentially, it just logged that you launched the app.
The fix is out for both Android and iOS. See the links to the release announcement below for info.
Android - Plex for Android
iOS - Plex for iOS
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Facebook has tons of data from you. Every site you visit and every app you use, that somehow uses facebook login, facebook like or facebook count pixel is sending your data to facebook. And they are tracking users, regardless if those have a facebook account or not.
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I’d say it’s pretty significant that the only reason we have any idea this was going on was because Facebook themselves chose to give us some way of seeing what data they collected on us.
If they’d been more disingenuous we probably would never know and keep sending data to them indefinitely.
