“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.”

  • @TK420
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    131 year ago

    It’s not a 15 minute setup no. However, if you have lots of media and devices, this is really the only thing like it. Yes there are alts, but it’s the same boat.

    • Victor
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      21 year ago

      Definitely like a 15 minute setup on Linux 🤷‍♂️

      • @TK420
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        61 year ago

        I was not talking about just installing the server itself, the whole planning, installing, organizing etc. being more than 15 mins

        • @[email protected]
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          1 year ago

          If you want a decent setup, I’d suggest Radarr (movies) and Sonarr (TV) and a torrent client to get started. Three packages, and they can all run in Docker containers.

          • @TK420
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            51 year ago

            I have a decent setup and I don’t use any of that. No need for that when I’m using discs as my sources vs downloads.

            • @[email protected]
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              21 year ago

              That’s not a decent setup; that’s an awesome setup! Just not as beginner-friendly IMO.

              • @TK420
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                11 year ago

                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.

                • Victor
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                  11 year ago

                  What quality/format do you rip to?

                  • @TK420
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                    21 year ago

                    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.

        • Victor
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          11 year ago

          What are you planning and organizing? I just make a folder “series” and one “movies”, dump all the respective content in those, start the scan and start watching. 🤷‍♂️

          • @TK420
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            21 year ago

            I bought dedicated hardware and shucked a lot of drives to get all the storage I needed. I modded and old case to put this in, added a couple of blu ray drives for ripping my media. Also I needed to update music brainz because it had incorrect or non existent data.

            I had an initial server that was quick and dirty and was great, but I needed it to handle all of my media and it does pretty well. Always can use more storage because I’m constantly buying media on discs.

            • Victor
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              1 year ago

              Ah okay, I see. I have two drives adding up to 14 TB that I store everything on, in my main PC. (Looking to change this with a NAS or something.)

              And eh… We have different ways of acquiring media, we could say. 🙂 And probably different storage needs due to that as well.

              But yeah, it makes sense that it is more than 15 minutes if you include all that. But installing and setting up the storages in Plex and stuff, not a huge task, which is nice.

              • @TK420
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                21 year ago

                I’m always getting media in a number of ways. Source rips and downloads are the best vs what’s available to the general public. I’m ok with what I’ve got going on.

                • Victor
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                  11 year ago

                  Sounds awesome, friend. Keep building that library!

      • @[email protected]
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        21 year ago

        For me its less than that on both Linux and windows. Unless things have changed when I ran windows it was a exe file you just double clicked on to set up. If you have the bamining schemes correct and the way Plex has you set it up is the same its qui k

        • Victor
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          21 year ago

          Honestly I never had to do anything about naming schemes either. Just make a folder “movies” and one “series”, dump all the respective content in each of those and start the scan and start watching. “Borrowed” content from the internet just works, no problem. 🤷‍♂️

          Should all be done within 15 minutes easy.