Plex users rage over Discover Together privacy concerns

It appears many Plex users got more than they bargained for with the service’s new Discover Together feature, which has been sending out emails divulging their viewing habits to anyone on their Plex friends list. 

While Discover Together, which emerged from beta testing last month, offers a series of privacy settings that control who can see your Plex watch history and other activity, users are complaining (with justification) that it’s all too easy to breeze past those settings during the onboarding process.  

Threads on Plex’s community site and on the Plex subreddit are buzzing with reports from users who were “horrified” to learn that their streaming activity had been shared with Plex friends via the “Week in review” emails, 404 Media reports, including to some Plex “friends” they’d never known they’d had. 

“What the hell are people at Plex thinking,” wrote one user on a Plex discussion forum. “Automatically opting everyone in for sharing their watch history with friends? Who in their right mind would do such a thing?” 

Officially launched early last month, Discover Together allows Plex users to share their watch histories, watch lists, and ratings of recently watched TV shows and movies with their Plex friends. 

The feature is part of Plex’s “Discover” tab, a universal directory and search tool that encompasses video titles across a wide range of streaming platforms (including Netflix, Max, Disney+, and Hulu) as well as Plex’s own selection of on-demand and live linear channels. 

While your Plex profile doesn’t automatically track what you’ve watched on third-party services (you must manually check those titles as “watched” in the Plex Discover tab), it can automatically track what you’ve watched from Plex’s own catalog of streaming videos, as well as videos you’ve streamed from a personal Plex server—including your own, or someone else’s–provided those titles can be “matched” on IMDb. (Titles marked as “adult” on IMDb aren’t shared in your Plex activity feed, but that wouldn’t exclude racy content that was matched on IMDb but didn’t get tagged as “adult,” Plex told 404 Media.)

When Plex rolled out the Discover Together feature to its general user base last month, it served up a series of onboarding screens that included privacy controls, which are initially set to “private.” 

But your privacy settings will be changed to “Friends Only” for your watch history, watch list, and ratings, and “Friends of Friends” for your friends list, unless you manually change those settings back to “Private” before clicking the Finish button during the Discover Together onboarding process. 

Imgur, via Reddit

Plex users are also complaining that they didn’t realize that anyone with whom they’d shared their personal Plex libraries were automatically added to their Plex friends list—meaning, in some cases, that near-perfect strangers were getting weekly email digests of their viewing histories. 

In a response to the 404 Media story, a Plex spokesperson admitted that while the service sent both email and “in-app” announcements about Discover Together, “many users became ‘aware’ of the feature for the first time last week when Plex sent out the activity emails,” and that some users “may have clicked through these [privacy] settings during the onboarding process without reading their selections.” 

Asked for further comment by TechHive, a Plex rep had this to say:

We are currently having conversations about making changes to the onboarding page and will communicate those updates to our users. We understand that some users are upset by the current design of this page and we are listening closely to their feedback. We also know many of our users have made changes to their privacy settings from the current onboarding screen. 

The Plex spokesperson also promised changes to the “Week in review” emails, which (we’re told) were originally slated to go out daily rather than weekly:

These weekly digest emails are not currently mentioned during the onboarding process, but we are working towards updating the screen to communicate this and allow users to choose their email settings up front. Of note, these emails were included during the beta period and were well received.  

And as for the issue of how those granted access to your personal Plex library wound up on your Plex friends list, here is Plex’s response:

Until this summer, anyone you shared a personal library with had to be someone you’re friends with on Plex. During the beta period, however, we received feedback that Discover Together users wanted to share their personal libraries with one set of people and share their Discover Together activity with others. In response to this feedback, we made it possible for users to share their personal libraries with other users without being friends on Plex, and users can also unfriend someone without revoking their access. We did not change anyone’s existing friendships or shares once Discover Together went off beta. 

Luckily, you can go back and change your Plex privacy settings if you want to keep your watch history to yourself. 

First, log into your Plex account from a web browser (you can’t do this from the Plex app), click your user icon in the top-right corner, click Profile > Edit Profile, click Edit in the Privacy Settings section, then make your privacy changes—including, if you wish, changing each setting to Private. 

Second, to keep your Plex activity (including your streams on personal Plex servers) from automatically being added to your Plex profile, click your user icon in the top-right corner again, select Settings, scroll down to the Sync My Watch State and Ratings section, click Update this setting, then click the Stop Syncing Now button. 

You can also review a handy rundown of other Plex privacy tools and settings on this site, which includes instructions on how to manage your Plex friends list.

Updated shortly after publication with comments from Plex.