Plex Discover Together shares a bit too much. ...

www.404media.co Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family

"I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff," a user said of Plex's Week in Review email and Discover Together feature.

Although the headline focusses on a obvious category of media, it really can go wrong on a lot of other categories as well.

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39 comments

This isn't an entirely "new" feature, in a way.
You always had access to see what your friends were watching on your own server. This is a consequences of being an admin, you kind of have to have access to that kind of data to manage your system and streams.
This seems to just extend it to showing you what they're watching on other servers, as well.
Anyway, if the concern is that Plex, the company, has access to this data, then yeah, you probably should have read the privacy policy a little closer.
Jellyfin is there and doesn't have a parent company to "phone home" data to.
- It's unfortunate that Jellyfin is just slightly worse than Plex at pretty much everything. Playback is smooth, sure, but set up is harder, getting good metadata is harder, logging in is harder, etc.
  The metadata one really put me off. I set up a Jellyfin instance with the exact same media set as my Plex instance, and it immediately started "recognizing" standard movies and shows as porn and hentai. I'm still going to push through and get it properly set up eventually, but even so, I'm not looking forward to manually managing accounts when people can just SSO with Plex.
  
  it immediately started "recognizing" standard movies and shows as porn and hentai.
  Jellyfin just knows its users and knows what they want.
  
  I wonder if the Romans or any ancient people used jellyfish(es) for alternative purposes...They used sponges to wipe themselves, communally
  
  I've had similar issues/experiences with Jellyfin as well.
  
  Metadata has been far better in JF than Plex.
  
  I mean, I have a ton of media that Plex recognizes automatically and Jellyfin doesn't, so... Agree to disagree, I guess. I'm not trying to defend Plex's recent enshittification, but that doesn't change the fact that it's generally a better experience than Jellyfin right now.
- Anyway, if the concern is that Plex, the company, has access to this data, then yeah, you probably should have read the privacy policy a little closer.
  come on, you know this is a non answer. also plex shouldn't have this data, it should be for the admin only.
  
  It's a non-answer that their privacy policy explicitly states that they will collect this type of information and that they stipulate what kind parties they can share that info with?
  https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/
  That's the straightest answer that you're going to get. Privacy policies like this are bullshit, but they're also the norm so acting like it's a non-answer after 20 years of this being the norm seems a little... naive, perhaps?
  
  They say they use it to sync up your watch history to your account so it can sync across devices, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were selling your watch telemetry to advertisers as well.
  
  At that point i would be surprised if they didn't
  
  What? Plex is not one of those open source, self-hosted, privacy-centric services. Plex can do whatever the hell Plex wants with your watch history, because you agreed to their broad terms of service that said exactly that when you signed up. You chose to run your traffic and authentication through Plex servers because it's convenient, not for privacy reasons.
  If you don't like it, use Jellyfin. I'm personally looking into moving, as Plex seems to be getting slowly shittier.
  
  why are you defending them? sure, they're allowed because they're a big company so they make the rules, but that doesn't mean you have to lick their boots and say oh actually that's fine you made the choice. even big companies SHOULD be ethical. we DESERVE ethical treatment, furthermore, even people who didn't wade through the terms.
  
  I don't know how you could read that and think I'm defending them.
  I'm just telling you how the world works. If you want real privacy, you need to PAY somebody with a rock-solid privacy agreement or fully host it yourself. Plex is neither of those things. Remember, if something that costs money to run is free, then YOU are the product.

39 comments