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.
Thanks for the heads up, not a fan. I’ve been running it concurrently with Jellyfish but looks like it may be time to ditch it.
That’s why I just can’t trust proprietary software anymore. Some of it is unavoidable though without making things unnecessarily hard/worse for yourself.
Shit like this gets pulled all the time, most of it is probably never discovered because it’s all hidden somewhere deep in their executables/firmware/binary blobs or whatever shit they push onto you…
I left Plex as soon as they made it a pain to not use cloud logins.
Wtf? Why are you asking me to look g into MY system through your server? Get outta here.
This is why I don’t use Plex.
I went to install it once because I heard it was good. It said the next step of the installer is make a plex online account so I can log in. I looked for the ‘I don’t want online I want local’ option but I didn’t see one. So I uninstalled.
Nowhere did it explain what if any access Plex servers have to my media library (metadata or files), so I said no thanks I’ll just go back to using folders.
Glad to see I made the right choice.
I’ve had plex and the arrs going but without a VPN (USA), got hundreds of take down notices sent to an old email address and went to spam folder, and two personal paper letters from ISP. I decided to shut down the arrs and haven’t torrented in about a few months.
A few weeks ago I added someone on plex to share my media with. Just got a 3rd letter from my ISP for sharing media. Plex is the only thing running that could cause this.
Time to finally shut it down and load Jellyfin. It’s been coming for some time; but this is the nail in the coffin.
Making me more glad i never had plex. DLNA ftw!
Uses Plex over real open source like jellyfin and is surprised when his data is scraped. Get a clue then I’ll care
Just use Plex offline and you are good to go. If you don’t know how to use Plex offline read up about reverse proxies like Nginx and how you can allow access to download meta data but block basically all the rest and even fake that Plex thinks its online.
I guess you could do that…or you could switch to a company that hasn’t gone to $hit like Jellyfin or Emby.
Please elaborate more on the blocking, such as what IPs should be whitelisted.
so what’s the option now? jellyfin?
A self hosted app that isn’t self hosted, baffling why people use plex instead of Jellyfin
Plex crossed the line a long time ago.
Don’t forget every email provider who accepted the email (and all three letter agencies who monitor unencrypted email) also have that info now as well.
Great, another stalker. Glad I bailed out a year or more ago to Jellyfin.
Is plex trying to accelerate their “customer” fleeing their platform? I’m pretty sure that one of the most important financial metrics they report is number of active users, and I’d think they’d be trying real hard to avoid customer churn. Sending out that “we’re watching you” creepy vibe seems counterproductive.
This is why I use Kodi. Nothing leaves my home network, and I directly control all data myself
Well, one of the reasons I use Kodi at least
how reliable is the kodi addon for hdhomerun? looks like it’s unofficial and not supported.
Has jellyfin’s UI improved? My wife preferred plex, and plex has a native Samsung app 😮💨
As much as I want to switch, Samsung app store has me stuck currently.
They are working on getting the Jellyfin app to the Samsung Tizen store, but it’s a slow process. The app itself if working quite well already, if you manually install it (which is rather simple if you have docker installed)
Jellyfins UI is fine imo. You can also use Kodi with some addons to connect to your Jellyfin server.
Why not just sideload the apk and try it for yourself? Android doesn’t bind you to specific stores, just sideload F-Droid and get Jellyfin there (or download it directly from F-Droids/Jellyfins homepage)
Damn, I know FireTV app store and of course Google Play Store have Jellyfin clients. Sucks that Samsung is so limited.