âI can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff,â a user said of Plexâs Week in Review email and Discover Together feature.
Many Plex users were alarmed when they got a âweek in reviewâ email last week that showed them what they and their friends had watched on the popular media server software. Some users are saying that their friendsâ softcore porn habits are being revealed to them with the feature, while others are horrified by the potentially invasive nature feature more broadly.
Plex is a hybrid streaming service/self-hosted media server. In addition to offering content that Plex itself has licensed, the service allows users to essentially roll their own streaming service by making locally downloaded files available to stream over the internet to devices the server admin owns. You can also âfriendâ people on Plex and give them access to your own server.
A new feature, called âDiscover Together,â expands social aspects of Plex and introduces an âActivityâ tab: âSee what your friends have watched, rated, added to their Watchlist, or shared with you,â Plex notes. It also shares this activity in a âweek in reviewâ email that it sent to Plex users and people who have access to their servers.
This has greatly alarmed a wide swatch of Plexâs user base, who have blown up the Plex forums, the Discover Together blog post comment section, and Reddit with posts about disastrous overshares created by the feature. A sampling of posts: âDiscover Together and Week in Review emails are a MASSIVE breach of privacy and trust!,â âSecurity breach: Why is my friend receiving notifications to rate movies Iâve watched?,â âWeekly review emails data leak,â âPlex crossed a line with âYour week in reviewâ emails today.ââ
The feature is opt-out, meaning that many people were very surprised to get these emails and see this feature, as itâs up to users to proactively turn it off (instructions here and here).
âI can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff (think classic âskinemaxâ fare) from some server (itâs not mine) or Plex channel, and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this,â one user wrote on the Plex Forums. âNow replace this friend, whoâs just enjoying their downtime with some cheeky T&A, with a teenager who may be having difficulty figuring out feelings about their sexuality and are just trying to explore by watching LBGT dramas to see if anything there resonates or can help them figure things out. Suddenly, one of their intolerant friends or parents gets a detailed email report with a cheery title listing every little thing theyâre watchingâŠThis is a dystopian nightmare of a feature and I honestly canât believe itâs been rolled out as opt-out like this. SHAME ON YOU, PLEX!â
âI wonder how many people just had their weekâs porn selections emailed to their Plex friends,â another user posted. âI just got an email about a friendâs watching habits which he definitely didnât want to share. He insists heâs never opted into any data sharing, butâŠit went out anyway.â
âIâm sure thereâs a certain percentage of people who want to know what kind of porn their grandma likes, but Iâm hoping itâs not the majority,â another posted.
Otto Kerner, who is a moderator of the official Plex forums, said that porn viewing habits would only be shared if Plex can make a âmatchâ of the media with online databases like IMDb. âMany pr0n titles are either not listed there at all [sic],â Kerner wrote. Itâs worth noting, however, that there are many adult titles on IMDb.
There are hundreds of posts about the issue on the official Plex forums, many of which point out that many Plex users chose to use the service in the first place because it is a âself-hostedâ alternative to streaming that many people go into believing they will have more control and privacy than is offered by Hulu, Netflix, and other streaming services. Plex is also used by many users to play and stream files that they have illegally pirated (the ability to do this is largely behind the initial popularity of Plex), though the company has been trying to move away from the perception that most people are using it to play pirated content. âThe fact that this data is available to you AT ALL ⊠That is just ⊠Mind boggling, and completely against the very notion of self hosting,â one user wrote. âI feel betrayed that was done without telling me that this data was going to be collected. Let alone acted upon. Itâs dangerous. Certain entities would LOVE to have that dataâŠwhich could mean jail time for some.â
âThe âSee what your friends are watchingâ will be great for all the people with secret porn libraries. Or when you start watching a Jan 6th documentary, and you see Aunt Becky start commenting about it being part of a satanic conspiracy,â a commenter on Plexâs blog post announcing the feature wrote. âI can also say that not one person I have talked to has ever liked the idea that I can see what theyâre watching from my server.â
Plex did not respond to requests for comment sent from 404 Media. Plex employees have been posting regularly in the forums explaining that people can opt out of the data sharing, and have also said media watch âsync events,â which it uses to track viewing history, do not tell the company the nature of the file played: âThere is no way to know whether something being âwatchedâ occurred because you went and saw it at the theater and then marked it on the Discover page when you got home, you watched through a personal Plex Media Server Library, or anything else.â
Does it have an official app on all smart tvs and plug devices (Roku/firestick) like plex? That would be the hurdle for me, all of my family is happy with plex because every device including the $400 trash Black Friday TVs have a plex app already on them, they just need to sign in.
It does have a Roku app, but itâs very limited in features and barely developed. It will probably work if all your files are x264 in your native language, however it doesnât work for my use case. I tried playing some anime encoded with x265 and it was unwatchable for me because:
A. The TV could not handle the decode and there is no (sensible) way to force server x264 transcoding for just the TV, and:
B. Selecting subtitles and audio tracks is painful and sometimes impossible. I tried changing my Jellyfin settings, my Roku settings, using the selectors on the episodes, even setting the default tracks in the video files. Nothing worked to have dual audio or dual subtitle files play the correct tracks.
I canât speak for any other ecosystems, only Roku.
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I have a Samsung TV and there is no official app for it. You have to side load it from a community repo. This was another factor for why I donât use Jellyfin as much, especially since my partner primarily uses the TV and is not as tech savvy.