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.
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.
Isn’t the content of that email what the other people see though? If you disable your sharing, then yours won’t be shared but others might be unless they decide to disable it. I opted out of those emails.