Plex Users Fear New Feature Will Leak Porn Habits to Their Friends and Family
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.
"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.”
Honestly Plex has always given me the icks. Its weird hybrid of self-hosted but managed through their servers always struck me as the worst of both worlds. I'd rather put in a small amount extra effort to properly self-host my stuff, or do significantly less work and use something cloud-based. I just don't understand what niche Plex is supposed to serve.
What is it with all this "sharing with friends and family"? FFS if I want to share something, I will fucking call them and tell them about it, I don't need some stupid app doing that for me
I got blindsided by this in the same way. I was sitting next to a coworker and they said "Oh hey, a report on what you've been watching on Plex!"
Now, I thought that it was reporting what I'd been watching on his Plex server, and I've always known he can see what I watch. But he showed me the email. It was stuff I'd been watching on my own Plex server.
Now it wasn't embarrassing stuff, as it's my family Plex server, but I was absolutely livid. This is private. Period. I can think of many, many reasons that someone would want to keep this private, even if it's not about porn.
I alerted my friends, and we all figured out how to turn it off. It seems like it shouldn't be that big of a deal, but I feel extremely violated. I absolutely know that someone in that meeting said "Hey, some users won't like this," and they were overridden. Because some senior director had a metric to hit. And that means they no longer care about their reputation. It's a sign that they've gotten too big to care.
Softcore? How embarrassing. Go hardcore or go home.
But like...why would anyone even want that for normal content?
There's no shortage of good movies and shows out there. If someone opts in to sharing something with me, they can do it in just about any way. Generally speaking, discoverability in media is not my problem. This sort of feature is great for studios and streaming services, to keep people watching; but for self-hosted it makes no sense at all.
That’s why Jellyfin exists, though admittedly, it was a little more difficult for me to set up the sharing than I would have preferred. Now, I’m up and running, so all is well.
Heck, Emby is still an option if you don’t want a fully open-sourced one. Plex has been steadily moving in this direction for at least the last year or so, which makes me surprised at folks’ surprise over their “privacy” with Plex.
Lol reminds me of Windows plastering all your photos on the home screen and people being mortified about it
Hello jellyfin my old friend!
Anytime I feel that jellyfin isn't ready yet, I am so SO happy that I'm not using Plex and I notice that jellyfin is pretty awesome
Now we can all be congressmen.
Any common sense having person running a Plex server should know to segment anything… private to another media management application. ESPECIALLY if it’s tied to any thing with your identity and doubly so if you share your libraries with friends’ Plex accounts.
I used Jellyfin and different mapped folders for this for a hot second.
Buf I can’t recommend the open source Stash App for this use enough. Very great tagging, media management, different types of media, and it’s specifically for this.
Just don’t use Plex if you’re streaming porn. Either use something like Jellyfin or Stash (which is specifically built for organizing collections of porn… if you’re into that kinda thing).
TIL people have extra space for porn on their Plex servers. I’m surprised because I don’t think I’ve saved any porn since the dialup days because, well, dialup.
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Just in case anyone is looking to have their adult content streamable but kept separate from Plex/Jellyfish etc check out Stash, really easy to spin up a container. Works well, bit rough around the edges though.
While this is kind of messed up, I have never heard of this feature and don't have any friends on Plex but when I checked my privacy settings they were already set to Private. Additionally the menu says it will automatically revert to private every two years. So it seems like people had to manually share their activity with their friends for this to be an issue.
the trick is to not have friends (on plex)
Any cheesy softcore that involves breast expansion.. asking for a friend, who wants to watch porn with me.
So, obviously this is a very bad thing to happen to Plex; however there is a secret/locked library functionality iirc from using it before.
Let's just assume that everyone is watching porn.
sticky situation
What the usual cost of small plex server? (1000 movies + tv shows+anime combined)
Where my a4k dawgs at?
Where my a4k dawgs at?
Is this any different than server admins using Tautulli? I'd assume so, since it's happening for users with multiple servers.
Privacy issues aside, who is using Plex for porn? There's many better options tailored to that type of content specifically. I'm not sure what benefit you'd get from using Plex for porn.
Weird, the hate here for that feature is crazy! I remember recommending something similar to this as a feature to emby years ago, but instead, it would be a home screen category where it lists the most recently watched content of your other users. They said they liked it but, of course, never got around to doing anything with that.
I guess I am shocked that any kind of porn would be added to these kinds of libraries at all. As the admin of my emby library, I share it is strictly tv and movies. If I want to setup something local to use, then I have Kodi for that or just stream sites? Just the thought of adding that content and trying to keep it private sounds like too much stress.
Also, as the admin, I see everything my friends watch anyway, which I would assume is the same on plex? Sure, it's not everyone knowing what everyone is watching, but someone still can see your activity.
The only thing I agree on is that the feature should have been added as disabled, but at least they are adding unique features. It's probably getting harder trying to figure out what else to add or do these days.