“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.”
It’s unfortunate Plex seems hell bent on adding features nobody asked for while there forums are full of issues that have gone unsolved for years.
If only there was a FOSS alternative to plex which slowly gained popularity…
I for one would love to use Jellyfin. Though I’ve found in my personal experience it’s not as stable as Plex nor has as many features yet. I currently have both running on my home system but primarily use Plex. One day I will fully switch.
I put off using Jellyfin for years because of comments like this. Finally made the switch three years ago and lo and behold… it’s just a better Plex. More customizable, less intrusive and the syncplay actually works. There are a few issues client-side depending on your platform, but other than that I don’t get the criticism.
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 it’s very limited in features and barely developed. It will probably work if all your files are x264 in your native language, however it doesn’t 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 can’t speak for any other ecosystems, only Roku.
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 don’t use Jellyfin as much, especially since my partner primarily uses the TV and is not as tech savvy.
Yeah, it is the best
Curious what issues you have? In my experience plex was very annoying to work with while Jellyfin has been working stable like a charm.
Hardest part has been sideloading it on a smart tv But other then that it worked out of the box.
I do however keep everything local and offline, what really pushed me away from plex was how it kept nagging about making an account and “verifying that i own this server” ever single time i wanted to watch sm.
I have two main issues:
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The appletv app isn’t as smooth and fast as plex. It is hard to convince my wife to switch when the user experience is not as good.
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No profile fast switch. Unlike any other streaming service (Plex included) jellyfin doesn’t offer a list of profiles on startup to select who’s watching. This is a huge issue for me, as my wife, son and I uses the same devices with our own profiles.
Are you using Swiftfin?
Yes. I’ve tried all the available clients.
Interesting. I’ve actually had the opposite experience. Jellyfin has been smoother and more reliable than Plex. Maybe it’s worth checking out Emby, I think it solves the fast client switching (but I’m not entirely positive). I’ve just taken to running both. When I hit Plex snags I pop over to Jellyfin.
I guess milage may vary on the road you take and your destination as i don’t use either of those.
I believe tv use is very low priority for them as its also tricky to get compatible and working, quite telling that the native ios app is from a third party with the official one being a browser wrapper.
I was considering making a separate account for my kid once they are old enough to operate the remote so thanks for the heads-up.
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As a dedicated Jellyfin user, 100% agree. I love it, but glitches where it loses my seek progress and requires restarting the video, or the terrible subtitle support on Roku, or the often lackluster library management (they improve it slowly though!), and more I’m sure, these all make it much harder to recommend.
One feature I enjoy is hardware acceleration without paying for it
Plex charges for THAT?
It’s paid if you want to use hardware acceleration for transcoding (“Hardware-Accelerated Streaming”).
Tip!: Hardware-accelerated streaming is a premium feature and requires an active Plex Pass subscription.
https://support.plex.tv/articles/115002178853-using-hardware-accelerated-streaming/
Sounds pretty ass to me. It’s your hardware lmao
Tried installing it once and literally had to give up, whereas Plex works mostly on the first try each time I’ve changed oses/servers. But yeah I wish I could use jellyfin
Docker should be piss easy
One would think
It definitely is in most cases
I’ll give it another shot eventually. If memory serves I had trouble getting the container started at all, until I found a specific way to configure it, then once it started, it had a lot of issues with metadata that at the time felt like a headache
It’s easy to get started; not as easy to maintain.
What do you mean? I don’t think there’s much at all of maintenance needed to be done.
That’s why I stopped paying for Plex about 7 years ago. The CEO clearly has other priorities than making Plex serve home media.
They’ve decided money is more important than a good product, I just turn everything extra off as soon as they announce it on my server
They’re a for-profit company. All of their new features are aimed at increasing revenue, either by introducing ad based content (and growing the user base that watches ad based content), or new features behind a paywall. The only way for those bugs to get fixed is if they risk reducing potential revenue.
I think the feature is cool and I’m looking forward to it personally.
Maybe they should have made it opt in, but social features like this on other platforms like discord and stream aren’t, so … eh.
That’s how most development works nowdays, doesn’t it? Move fast and break things, create constant new content before people tire of the old, etc. Sad.
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.
Same reaction here. My Plex install lasted until I realized that I had to log into their servers to watch my own content. WTF is an understatement.
You don’t have to log into it, you can turn off authentication for your local network.
If you’re accessing it over the Internet without a VPN, then it should be no surprise that it requires a “cloud” login.
It is a bit of a surprise though because I can host my own authentication (Keycloak, Authelia, Google OAuth as a stretch), or use the built in auth from the service the way Jellyfin does it.
I use Plex because it Just Works™ for my family, but eagerly waiting for Jellyfin to keep catching up.
Who said anything about authentication to access it? A server cannot be set up without creating an account with the company and allowing the server to send Plex data.
You did. It was implied in your statement about logging into their servers. If you didn’t mean that then you should have worded it differently.
Wow, you not only think you’re a mind reader, you lecture like a 1st grade English teacher. You must be really fun at parties.
Yes, everything that you imagine about me is true. Have fun imagining whatever you want.
Honestly it’s a good feature for most, same with auth being a cloud service. But it would be nice to be able to self host that part too.
For remote access an account makes sense, but like many people I have no need of accessing my content without a VPN. There are other options out there that do not require logging into a company’s server to set up a local server.
I think if you are aiming for the general public it’s great that you can handle secure remote access and authentication. Because those things are the easiest to mess up and leave you vulnerable.
Plex is great at what it offers, and if that offering didn’t fit your needs then by all means use something else.
I cannot fathom why Plex is so dominant while Jellyfin, for my taste, is better. And Jellyfin is explicitly free, contributors cannot be paid, because they are funded by their intense hatred of capitalism.
Is Netflix for torrents. On my TV, on my phone, at my in-laws. Pause on my phone and resume on my TV.
Surely it can’t be that hard to get it.
The remote stuff is easily achievable with other methods, like hosting a VPN server of some sort.
This but instead of familiarity, it’s capability
I used the embed version in the hopes it would, well, embed lol, but I guess it didn’t work, thanks tho!
Requires a lot more setup, especially on the client side. Media server software make things a lot easier.
I just Selfhost tailscale now days, but it’s true that setting up VPNs can be a pain, especially if it’s containers and/or supposed to be an overlay network.
no need to setup or pay for ipv4 tunnels (which is basically what plex handles for you) or ipv6 (while ipv6 IS great, prefixes offered by isps are usually dynamic and you’ll need ipv6 on your mobile connection too)
getting a public ipv4 is basically impossible task nowadays, most isps only hand them out to registered business on enterprise grade connections, and even if you’re a business, STATIC ip is an extra upsell.
and isps that do hand out them to customers charge extra for it, and usually quite a lot.My ISP gives static IP for free to all customers. Other popular ISPs in my region which are popular among people even moderately savvy will offer it for a very modest fee ($5/month extra is what a quick Google suggests).
Or you can set up dynamic DNS. Use Cloudflare to point to your home IP address, and run an extremely simple script which automatically updates that IP address with Cloudflare.
The only way it becomes a problem is if your home Internet connection is behind CGNAT and can’t be changed. (From what I’ve heard, many ISPs that use CGNAT by default will give you a public IP as long as you notify them of your desire for one.) But that’s an egregiously bad service and you should be looking to move to a better company.
My privacy is again protected by not having friends!
Seriously though, I didn’t know there were ways to follow/friend people on plex. Why would one want to see what others are watching?
People share their plex servers with friends
I’m just seeing you can share libraries. How has plex not been DMCA’d out of existence?
Plex isn’t hosting the illegal content and that which they are hosting they properly license. Plex in particular is pushimg harder and harder to host content for you, instead of you hosting your own.
Officially, the ‘personal media server’ side of things is for sharing home videos/pictures, not commercialized content. (this applies to Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin)
It’s the users/server operators responsibly to have the correct licensing for whatever they are hosting to others.
Also Plex has been cozying up to media companies and the more they do the more action they’ve taken. Banning whole hosting providers (Hetzner) and even banning some small-time users running small servers.
Plex themselves aren’t doing the sharing
And DVD Jon wasn’t decrypting the DVDs
Yes he was. He decrypted DVDs which was the thing he got in trouble for.
Also breaking encryption is legally different than copyright infringement
they are proxying the data tho
it operate exactly like Netflix except data is stored on your drive
No idea I’ve never used it I just know some people who use it
I’m guessing because it’s not illegal. Their users are the ones breaking the law. Like reddit or Facebook, the platform isn’t held liable for the illegal activity it promotes.
I’d like to know what my friends are watching because then I might choose to watch the same thing so I could discuss it with them, especially if it was something I was planning on eventually watching anyway.
But OTOH I really don’t want to know about any of my friends’ porn watching habits.
Bro did you see that huge cumshot on Megan’s face? I can’t wait to see what they do next season after that cliffhanger.
But don’t you and your friends discuss what you’re watching? We talk about everything we like so the only things I’d learn from this are the things they watch but don’t like, their guilty pleasures, and their porn habits (though I also can’t imagine using plex for porn). I don’t want to know any of that.
Listen when companies SCREAM at you that they are intentionally ruining their service and selling you out. This is Plex saying very clearly to the public, “it’s been fun y’all, but it’s time for you to find an alternative service, start migrating NOW because it’s only going to get worse from here”
Sadly some people won’t get the message until Plex starts providing their movie streaming habits on request to the RIAA for lawsuits.
Edit: I meant MPAA, not RIAA (though they are probably giving it to them as well).
By the gods are you serious?
I left Plex when they added TV, because I felt the exact same way. It sucks to be right.
Still the only self-hosted option that has a native app for my old ass TV so I’m not switching until it becomes more trouble than it’s worth or my TV breaks.
Yeah, this is why my lifetime licence will go unused in the future …
Don’t worry too much about it going to waste.
What usually happens next is that your “lifetime licence” turns into an “ohhhh that’s a licence for the OLD system. We’ve introduced Plex Ultimate 2000! It’s got all these great new features, and it’s only $3.95 a month. Don’t worry, we won’t forget our greatest supporters, whoever has a lifetime licence for the worn out, old system, their first year’s subscription will be 25 percent off, yaay!”
Well maybe I don’t really trust their products or their company with my data anymore and since you can’t run it entirely on premise, that’s about it.
Soon as I saw that with Plex I noped the fuck out
More issues caused by features no one asked for but done anyways so investors can see “growth”
I wonder if there will ever come a time when the stock market ends up defeating itself because investors demand growth which makes the products shitty which drives away customers which causes contraction instead of growth.
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 replaced Plex with Jellyfin a few months ago and it’s been working great for my needs.
I am trying to do the same migration from plex to jellyfin but jellyfin keeps crashing on the server with ‘out of memory’ in the logs. As soon as I can stabilize that I will dump Plex lifetime. I initially had sync server setting turned on in Plex and Plex kept sending cleartext phone SMS about what I had watched the day before. That is turned off now. I asked Plex corp for a copy of my data. They sent it to me but ‘forgot’ to send the database table with watch history. They sent me that table when I complained it was missing. Fuck Plex and their spyware.
I tried jellyfin a year ago and could not switch as it did not have transcoded downloads feature. All of my library is 4k HDR and do not want to download dozens of gb of movies on my phone when traveling. Do you know by any chance that they have implemented this feature already?
You should learn how to use
ffmpegcommands.Lol, I won’t be using ffmpeg commands while I’m on holiday traveling and just want to watch a movie. It is faster just to download it from a torrent lower quality directly than jump through these hoops. And if I am doing that, why do then I need a media center anyway, I can just go back to the old days playing downloaded files directly.
The only thing holding me in plex is transcoded downloads.
Take a look at Emby.
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.
Mid stage enshitification. More is coming. Probably unskipable ads like every other service is moving to.
“A more affordable way to use Plex [or another subscription service]” is how it always starts…
“I see from your viewing that you are bi-curious.”
I wish that I, as the server admin, could opt out all of my users from this on their behalf. Shit like this should be opt in and it is seriously fucked up to enable by default, porn or not.
As much as server admins would love that option (and every time Plex roll out a new feature like the TIDAL integration or the free Plex content this question gets asked), it’s never going to happen because from Plex’s perspective they’re not your users, they’re Plex’s users. Doesn’t matter if the only reason they use Plex is to access your server, they’re not your users so you have no control over their settings.
We can disagree with them about that fact as much as we like, but that’s the reality of it, and I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
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.
Hell, just add a “recommend this to your friends” option on videos if you want to make plex more social. Complete watch history is creepy stalker levels of ‘social’
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 this really sucks for Plex users, but I’m glad I left that steaming pile of shit software. I’ve been using Jellyfin for two years now and have never had to deal with sudden new shitty default-on features that appear from out of nowhere. Not once. With Plex, that happened like every other release. I don’t miss it.
Once you get the reverse proxy or a vpn set up, you are golden.
I had more issues setting up old cartoons with Airing vs DVD ordering…
Plex isn’t another evil tech company, it’s just full of stupid features and unresolved bugs. Jellyfin just isn’t good enough to replace it yet; it’s more finicky to setup, isn’t as good as matching titles and displaying the metadata, and has fewer features. But it is catching up fast.
I set up jellyfin by pointing the prebuilt docker container to my media folder. And it just kinda worked.
Not saying your wrong, just that it wasn’t my experience.
Fair enough. I had to manually add my server a few times before it stuck. When it got working, many shows were mismatched or no title matches were found, some shows had rogue seasons as their own entries, and the entire design philosophy seems less together. All that said, these are just growing pains of newer software. I have no doubt I will genuinely prefer how Jellyfin works one day.
Agreed, I had been putting off trying Jellyfin until Plex kept having issues with my Chromecast. I sat down and prepared myself for an ordeal and it just wasn’t that.
There are different issues with it casting that Plex didn’t have, but it hasn’t balked at any of my media yet.
Same. For my needs (streaming 4k HDR over the LAN), Plex and jelleyfin have been basically equivalent
It’s not evil, it’s just for-profit.
If there’s money to be made by implementing a feature, they have incentive to do it, even if it actively makes the product worse. So long as it doesn’t make you leave, or rather, so long as it doesn’t make enough users leave that it negates the profit incentive.
A lot of people chose to use a self-hosted server to get AWAY from that tendency
It’s not evil, it’s just for-profit.
Potato potahto.
The title matching is what made me go to Plex. Some shows were impossible to get sorted right on Jellyfin. Plus there’s a lot more ecosystem around Plex
It’s not impossible, you just need to name your files correctly. I haven’t had a single issue with either Jellyfin or Plex. Used both for many years.
Out of curiosity, what sort of challenges did you have with setting up shows in jellyfin? I’ve been working with it and haven’t encountered any issues yet
The issue, I think, was because most of what I use it for is anime. So some shows wanted the Japanese title, others wanted the English title, some couldn’t be found at all. My US TV shows and movies never had that problem.
Try Emby. I left Plex a few years back and Emby has been everything Plex used to be.
Lol reminds me of Windows plastering all your photos on the home screen and people being mortified about it
Who keeps their porn in Plex
There are way better software to Stash that
Yeah, and you don’t even have to use any software, you can just store it in a folder no one would care about, best hidden with a name resembling something boring no one would surely open
I keep my porn in a folder labeled “taxes” and my tax documents in a folder labeled “porn”
Best comment of the month award goes to you, genuinely made me chuckle
Plot twist he hates seeing nudity but gets really turned on seeing a tax document.
Don’t kink shame!
Or in a Veracrypt container called “10 hours of rain.avi”.
Many have caught onto the “boring name” thing and will click on any folder with a mundane name even slightly out of place. Encrypted ZIP files still work though, lol.
Encrypted ZIP files still work though, lol.
Unless you put them on Google in which case Google will break the encryption and look inside.
Absolutely true. Best practice is to assume your Google Drive is effectively public regardless of permissions. It is very easy for a Drive to get hacked in my experience, not even considering the surveillance from Alphabet.
I was just referring to the homework folder stereotype, i wouldn’t be that stupid to do something like this
Which is itself inside another folder nobody would look at.
“in a world where search doesn’t exist, one man, one labrinth of folders he must click through.”
Also bonus points if you are autistic. A lot of my folders are labeled with acronyms and my porn folder is the only one that is just random letters so it blends right in
