"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.
Many Plex users were alarmed when they got a “week in review” 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 friends’ 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 “friend” people on Plex and give them access to your own server.
A new feature, called “Discover Together,” expands social aspects of Plex and introduces an “Activity” tab: “See what your friends have watched, rated, added to their Watchlist, or shared with you,” Plex notes. It also shares this activity in a “week in review” email that it sent to Plex users and people who have access to their servers.
This has greatly alarmed a wide swatch of Plex’s 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: “Discover Together and Week in Review emails are a MASSIVE breach of privacy and trust!,” “Security breach: Why is my friend receiving notifications to rate movies I’ve watched?,” “Weekly review emails data leak,” “Plex crossed a line with ‘Your week in review’ emails today.’”
The feature is opt-out, meaning that many people were very surprised to get these emails and see this feature, as it’s up to users to proactively turn it off (instructions here and here).
“I can see that one of my friends is apparently watching a ton of cheesy, soft porn stuff (think classic ‘skinemax’ fare) from some server (it’s not mine) or Plex channel, and I am 100 percent sure they would be mortified to know that I know this,” one user wrote on the Plex Forums. “Now replace this friend, who’s 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 they’re watching…This is a dystopian nightmare of a feature and I honestly can’t believe it’s been rolled out as opt-out like this. SHAME ON YOU, PLEX!”
“I wonder how many people just had their week’s porn selections emailed to their Plex friends,” another user posted. “I just got an email about a friend’s watching habits which he definitely didn’t want to share. He insists he’s never opted into any data sharing, but…it went out anyway.”
“I’m sure there’s a certain percentage of people who want to know what kind of porn their grandma likes, but I’m hoping it’s not the majority,” 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 “match” of the media with online databases like IMDb. “Many pr0n titles are either not listed there at all [sic],” Kerner wrote. It’s 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 “self-hosted” 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. “The fact that this data is available to you AT ALL … That is just … Mind boggling, and completely against the very notion of self hosting,” one user wrote. “I feel betrayed that was done without telling me that this data was going to be collected. Let alone acted upon. It’s dangerous. Certain entities would LOVE to have that data…which could mean jail time for some.”
“The ‘See what your friends are watching’ 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,” a commenter on Plex’s blog post announcing the feature wrote. “I can also say that not one person I have talked to has ever liked the idea that I can see what they're watching from my server.”
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 “sync events,” which it uses to track viewing history, do not tell the company the nature of the file played: “There is no way to know whether something being ‘watched’ 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.”
Thanks. Remember, Plex is for YOUR media, so you know, I feel ripping is part of the basics of getting things setup and going.
As a note to other readers: I still rip everything manually because something at some point breaks an automated process and it has to be done manually anyway….so I just do it all manually these days. Takes less time, and when I have done my library over again (a few times) I still did it all manually.
What quality/format do you rip to?
CDs are ripped bit for bit into wav files
DVDs have subtitles retained but I don’t compress after MakeMKV.
BDs have subtitles retained but then I run through handbrake and do h265 compression, keep it all as mkv files.
Good stuff!
I see, so you just store the CDs raw? Are you like an audiophile with super equipment and all that? 🙂
And you listen (only?) from Plex on all your devices, or no?
Yeah I store the CDs raw. I have enough storage on my phone that I can load up from PlexAmp. I do a lot of offline listening so I love the download options and I usually stream my whole library from my server over WiFi.
I have a good amount of video downloaded in the main Plex app, workout vids, a few movies and whatever series I’m watching. All works out pretty well.
Okay so wav is mainly convenience for you, not a quality must-have, I take it?
No, quality is a thing which is why I’m using wav files. Audio files are tiny compared to video files. I’m approaching 1TB of music, where my video library is much larger, approaching a factor of 10 times as large….and also compressed. I’m not ripping my CD library in its entirety over again. I did various mp3 versions over the years and am done doing that to a different format again.
My university signals processing teacher a decade or so ago said something which I forgot, namely that there's a difference between quality and fidelity. Fidelity is what I meant to use 😁 whereas quality is the measurement of how little data you can use to store equivalent signals.
Which springs to mind, did you consider FLAC? You'd save a small amount of data, I guess, but it's lossless so you have both the true fidelity and higher quality (less data). 🙂 I'd be interested to hear if you explicitly discarded it as an option. Maybe the gain is negligible for you, e.g.
(By the way, thanks for yapping on about this with me!)
I used to fight the uphill battle against iTunes and my music. For home listening I had it all as Flac, because Flac, but for mobile I could then swap Flac for Apple Lossless kinda easy. iTunes would not recognize Flac files natively years ago (probably meow, but I don’t know).
Once Plex became my [media project] life, I didn’t want to fuck with all of that [converting CDs mentioned before] and just stuck with wav files. The OG so to speak and I’m pretty happy I’m not re-ripping music anymore. Now, new music, yes those eBay purchases get washed, ripped and stored in a binder, which is so much fun.
Do I hear a difference, maybe. What I do know is my quality issue is once it goes out of my phone via Bluetooth to my headphones. I hope one day that’s not the bottleneck. Could already be there I just don’t know.
Cool, thanks a lot for sharing!
I remember when I had the intention of owning all the music I liked on CDs. I really had to limit myself to favorites when my Spotify follow list grew to like hundreds (thousands? Can't remember) of artists. I'd be ruined getting all of their discographies.
You mean between FLAC and WAV? Shouldn't be a difference since they're both lossless, but maybe you meant something else.
But I feel you about the Bluetooth bit. I have an old colleague who won't buy a phone still without a 3.5 mm jack. Has to listen to music on the go, in high quality, all the time. 😅
I can hear a difference between some of my old MP3’s and lossless, but no difference between lossless formats.