As you may have seen Plex decided it was OK today to send an email showing me what my friends have been watching. To be clear, this is Plex telling other people what I’ve been watching from my server, with my files, and this is not OK.
We all knew it was a matter of time before Plex started collecting data on our libraries and sharing it with advertisers. What happened to their “we don’t know, and don’t want to know, what is on your server”?. This, for me, is proof that those fears were absolutely founded in reality. On what planet would I ever want this information to be shared with friends on family on an OPT OUT basis?
It’s totally unacceptable to collect this data in the first place. It’s totally unacceptable to share this information with uniquely identifiable information. And it’s totally unacceptable to do this without explicitly asking me if it’s OK.
Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about this as a server admin, because technically these are Plex users and their marketing email preferences are controlled on the user side in the Plex website preferences. Not on your server.
This is an absolutely egregious overreach.
Thank goodness there are alternatives available in the form of Jellyfin and Emby. I left my Plex server up after the Jellyfin January challenge we did on the Self-Hosted podcast but because of this I feel that I have no choice but to take it down for good.
Scarily, one can opt to receiving the summaries, but I see no tick box for sharing _my_ activity with friends???
Right - it’s controlled server side by Plex and so far as I can tell there’s nothing you can do. Your friends would have to go in and turn it off in their accounts. It’s disgusting.
I think you can disable it here:
Settings > Account > Sync my watch state and ratings
It’s kind of disguised as some feature to allow you to sync movie status among all plex servers. But disabling this would probably disable their ability to see it.
FYI, my setting is marked inactive, I do remember the in-your-face popup on my tv and I disabled all of the sharing. Still got an email this morning.
What other option do we have? Either stop using it or attempt to get Plex to respond and change their ways.
You can set it in your profile settings
But it’s worrying if it’s opt-out and not opt-in - even if they did prompt me to look at it when I first logged in after the added the Friends Discovery thing. Although the disclaimer suggests that for US users at least it might be opt-in, I honestly don’t remember what the default was for me.
This here. This setting is absolutely controllable and if memory serves me right i had to enable it when the feature rolled out. In fact, I just made a brand new account and after signing in the very first option is to either accept or change the setting.
I assume this stuff is US only at the mo’ because I can’t see those settings at all.
UK here and I can see it
exegamer76’s comment above gives the link
It seems to be the following:
Go to https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile/edit
Click on “Privacy Settings” at the bottom of the page
Dialog from the screenshot pops up
Thanks for sharing this. How do I get to the settings page you showed in the screenshot?
It seems to be the following:
- Go to https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile/edit
- Click on “Privacy Settings” at the bottom of the page
- Dialog from the screenshot pops up