disable this plex setting RIGHT NOW

Plex the app you run to run your private media server just push on an update that will email your friends and family what you've been watching this is one of the most toned deaf things I've seen a company do and honestly it is making it hard for me to keep using Plex in the past you have seen videos on Plex on this channel and I'll be honest with you I make videos of stuff I use and I use Plex I've enjoyed Plex I've got a ton of DVDs throughout the years and it's nice having a centralized media server to watch all of those and not have to carry them around and honestly I don't even have a DVD player anymore and so I've made tutorials on it however with this most recent update the company really is showing that it has changed from the Privacy focused hey whatever is on your media server is on your media server you do you this is just a great interface for using it into trying to make additional money and grow users by well sending out spam and not just Spam but also hey this is what your friends are watching and to make matters even worse they did not make it clear what was happening there was a single button that if you did not realize to click it when you're opening up your Plex app at one point you have opted into this and these are settings you need to check to make sure this is disabled and so in this video we're going to go over how to update your privacy settings as well as what this issue was and finally at the end I may be talking about switching over to something like jelly fin which is an open source competitor tolex that does not have these issues because it is not trying to build a company and get more people in and thinking that sending out your private Media Watch list is something that people want all right so right here this is one of the many examples of this occurring essentially about a week ago there was a notice on your dashboard when you logged in Plex for the very first time that said hey we've updated some privacy features hey you've got this watch list what do you want to do with it and I remember seeing this notice and I clicked private I tend to be that person anytime I see anything that I can opt out of I opt out of it just from a reflex honestly but if anybody else in your house click that and just click click through it as a lot of people do you were opted in to sending out email notifications of your watch list and this is one of the many examples right here this Reddit post Plex sent I Want Your Sex to all my friends and family members without my permission they literally are using your friends list and your watch History to essentially send your friend spam and say hey this is what this person's watching you should sign up for Plex and get on there and there are a ton of issues with this that I don't even know you to go into Plex when it was originally built especially if you look at old Forum posts the creators are like yeah we never going to keep a watch list that's not what this is whatever is your media is your media and now I see them trying to make more money and grow they've got a massive user base but a lot of them have already bought the Plex pass lifetime or are just not going to and so now they're trying to grow and to do this they are using you as marketers and saying hey this person's watching that and trying to grow like that which is not a great place to be and I think it is a very toned deaf thing that Plex did so assuming you do not want your friends and family members anybody you've shared your Plex library with just seeing all the stuff you've been watching we are going to go over how to opt out of this I'm going to leave a link to this post as well as this lovely post right here that somebody put together that actually goes through how to disable all the different sharing options we've got here they've got two sections how to disable this discovery sharing and that is the email notifications that friends and family members anybody who you shared with will get we're going to go over how to disable that and they've also got how to disable playback data being sent to Plex this is one that really bothers me because it was not opt in it was opt out and especially if you look at the old post by the Creator sulex they were saying we will never look at this information we don't care about this whatever is on your home media server is on your home media server we're only going to look at like debug metrics for breaking stuff and now it has changed so we're going to go in and we're going to follow these settings right here we're basically just going to log into Plex do this on a computer browser and then we are going to go into our profile so right here mine's going to be blurred out because I don't want you to see this either and you're going to see your watch list and other stuff right here what we can do is we are going to go ahead and hit edit profile and we are going to scroll down into a few different privacy settings down at the very bottom and you're going to want to hit every single one of these to be as restrictive as possible watch History private watch list private ratings private my friends private and for account visibility friends only is the most restrictive option and after that you should be not getting those emails sent out as you can see none of this made it look like you your friends and family were going to get emails about what you've been watching and I just think this was a really shady and toned deaf thing that Plex did now for the cherry on top we can also go into how to disable sending playback data to Plex which is insanely hard to get to we're going to go ahead and click on this link right here and you are going to think that you were on a forum post but in reality you are actually editing settings on your account right here this is the settings we got and we're going to go ahead and scroll down and you're going to disable send playback data to Plex right here it absolutely looks like this is something that is just a simple info document but in reality this is where you edit your settings once again making this very hard to see currently they do say that they do not get the actual content that was played but honestly they are changing more and more so hopefully disabling this is if they do update their privacy settings in the future to include that once again right now according to their Privacy Information they are not collecting titles played and we probably can trust this due to the fact that there would be a big old lawsuit if it was found that they were but this hopefully would not get opted back in if they ever do choose to do that I would generally just recommend disabling these things just because it's easier to disable all this analytics than to worry about what is in there so once you uncheck that there's no save button on the site at all once again this looks just like a help article but in reality this is where you edit those settings all right and so now to close out this video once you've done these things this is currently the best way to disable as much privacy settings as possible with in plx I also want to give a shout out to software called jellyfin and this is something that I've seen a lot of people deploying and I'm going to seriously look at deploying for myself because it is good old open source software that is essentially a Plex replacement obviously it's not like a clone or anything but it is its own version and it is built to be in the exact same way you've got movies shows music and all the normal stuff you'd like as well as books that Plex does not have and so this is essentially the open source version of it where you can literally come in here and start contributing to the software if you want something on there you can start adding it in there yourself love open source projects for that and I'm going to give these guys a shout out and honestly you will probably be seeing a jelly fin tutorial in a little bit here because what Plex has done here has not made me a happy customer and whenever you're working with open source projects like this you just don't have to worry about these things coming back because fundamentally it's not a company trying to make money now to play devil's advocate here the downside of not having a company like Plex building this thing instead relying on open source developers is mobile apps and stuff are not going to be as developed I hate to say that but if you look at the different media players here you will find that Infuse is the only Apple TV built- in one and so it's one of those things that depending on what you're using you might not have as many options as and as seamless of an experience but once again this is one of those projects where the more people who join it the more people sponsor it the more people who contribute to it both either through code or financially the more of this stuff will be built out and so it's really Community Driven and that is one of the best parts about it you don't end up with these massive companies who are just just trying to grow controlling your media all right well that's going to be it for this video I will leave a link on that Reddit post for how to opt out of all these features as well as to jelly fin site definitely give them a check out if you have any other questions leave those down in the comments below and what videos you'd like to me make in the future all right have a good one [Music] bye [Music] you

Channel: SpaceRex

Views: 53,116

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Id: RENjSPXJUdg

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 15 2023