Should Plex Stop Allowing Users To Opt Out of Data Collection? (www.plex.tv) 158
UPDATE: Plex has now made more changes to their privacy policy to address concerns about data collection, including "the ability to opt out of playback statistics for personal content on your Plex Media Server" and a promise "to 'generalize' playback stats in order to make it impossible to create any sort of 'fingerprint' that would allow anyone to identify a file in a library."
Here's what the original kerfuffle was about. Slashdot reader bigdogpete wrote: Many users of Plex got an email that said they were changing their privacy policy which goes into effect on 20 September 2017. While most of the things are pretty standard, users found it odd that they were now not going to allow users to opt-out of data collection. Here is the part from their website explaining the upcoming changes.
"In order to understand the usage across the Plex ecosystem and how we need to improve, Plex will continue to collect usage statistics, such as device type, duration, bit rate, media format, resolution, and media type (music, photos, videos, etc.). We will no longer allow the option to opt out of this statistics collection, but we do not sell or share your personally identifiable statistics. Again, we will not collect any information that identifies libraries, files, file names, and/or the specific content stored on your privately hosted Plex Media Servers. The only exception to this is when, and only to the extent, you use Plex with third-party services such as Sonos, Alexa, webhooks, and Last.fm."
What do you all think?
Here's what the original kerfuffle was about. Slashdot reader bigdogpete wrote: Many users of Plex got an email that said they were changing their privacy policy which goes into effect on 20 September 2017. While most of the things are pretty standard, users found it odd that they were now not going to allow users to opt-out of data collection. Here is the part from their website explaining the upcoming changes.
"In order to understand the usage across the Plex ecosystem and how we need to improve, Plex will continue to collect usage statistics, such as device type, duration, bit rate, media format, resolution, and media type (music, photos, videos, etc.). We will no longer allow the option to opt out of this statistics collection, but we do not sell or share your personally identifiable statistics. Again, we will not collect any information that identifies libraries, files, file names, and/or the specific content stored on your privately hosted Plex Media Servers. The only exception to this is when, and only to the extent, you use Plex with third-party services such as Sonos, Alexa, webhooks, and Last.fm."
What do you all think?
Meh. (Score:4, Insightful)
Don't like it, don't use it.
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I'll bet you one hundred thousand dollars there are people who care about invading my privacy.
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Don't be silly, Tom Robinson of Saginaw, Michigan.
Re: Meh. (Score:2)
Another Tom Robinson had it right: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=... [youtube.com]
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Be a decent human being and share data that helps the manufacturer develop a better product.
The idea that there is some sort of moral imperative for users to help manufacturers make better products is utterly bizarre.
If an outfit is forcing me to share my data with them to use their product, then fuck them. I'll either not use the product at all, or will firewall it to kingdom come.
However, there are certain products that I will share my data, if I'm asked nicely like a human being and there is a compelling reason to do so. But it must always be optional.
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you are aware that a large amount of "free" software is based exclusivly on invading your privacy right? where do they get their funding from?
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Revenue generation is often the intent of laws.
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> Most of the people using Plex are using it with pirated media. Naturally, they don't want to share that info.
You forgot to call them all Nazis while you're spreading total bullshit.
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... and now they are altering the terms drastically.
Pray they don't alter them any further.
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Can we at least agree that there is a pretty serious difference between someone who format-shifts content that they legally acquired and someone who isn't legally acquiring the content in the first place or is illegally sharing it?
The former may or may not be operating within the law, but they aren't pirates by any meaningful use of the term. The latter are pirates.
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In the US, format shifting is legal. That's why the companies pushed so hard to get anti-circumvention into the DMCA: they couldn't make format-shifting illegal, but they could make bypassing the access controls (which you need to do to format-shift) illegal all by itself.
Re: Introduced bias (Score:2)
Opting out also inherently skews the data. By providing that opt-out, data will only represent users that don't know or understand opting out. This means the sample of the population your are sampling may not be representative of the population. Psychologists have this issue very thoroughly studied.
In this case, I would argue that only the legally or technically savvy users will understand, thus meaning the data you get will be biased towards luddites.
(This comment does not pertain to the morality or oth
Re:Meh. (Score:5, Insightful)
Spend hours, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of hours establishing your data on a particular platform, have them insert a sentence in the "TOS" some random month, and "If you don't like it, don't use it!"
Most companies make it all but impractical for anyone without massive amounts of free time to "switch if you don't like it". This is completely on-purpose, and it has the effect of locking people into whatever the changes are. Not just Plex, but thing Microsoft & Apple. They make changes to platforms people have many thousands of dollars invested in, only to tell them "If you don't like it, switch."
Then, predictably, you have the group of users which champion the company's line ... hey everyone, don't like it, switch ... bait & switch is completely legitimate in 2017 for some. I mean, it's not like you could have made an educated decision before using the product, which is far more in line with what the "Free Market" has in mind. Not, making the "free choice" encumbers the decider with countless hours of countless dollars to reject changes they don't agree with.
Which is just the way the companies like it.
Then, after spending years barking at people to “Switch if you don’t like it!”, you wake up one morning and realize that there’s no one left to switch to; that every single company in the industry now has the exact same policies.
It’s at this point that the argument evolves to: “If you don’t like it, don’t use it!”
After all, nobody really NEEDS a computer. Or a cellphone. Or the internet. Or refrigeration or shoes for that matter. Or, probably one of truest of all claims videos to watch for entertainment.
If you want something, agree to the terms, no matter how nefarious they may be, regardless of when they are instituted. This ameliorates all notions of competition and free market dynamics, but those concepts are for queers anyway.
Give in, or stare out the window all day and do nothing.
The Unites States of America in 2017. Pining for the good old days is an oft-repeated thing, and proven to by a myth in many cases, but whether it’s reality or just my perception, things sure do feel different these days.
"terms of" considered harmful (Score:3)
You never know who has only been online for just a month or few, otherwise we could cut to the chase and simply name every last one one of them after their departure lounge orifice.
One has to be a staggeringly malignant blockhead to avoid becoming sensitised to this retroactive ass bite in l
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No relation other than a very satisfied customer.
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Well, there you go.
Spend hours, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of hours establishing your data on a particular platform, have them insert a sentence in the "TOS" some random month, and "If you don't like it, don't use it!"
I never invested a bunch of effort into Plex in the the first place, because this outcome was always plausible. Lo and behold, I made the right decision, and you (?) made the wrong one.
If you don't want this to happen to you, then don't invest your energy in something with central control like this.
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Heck, I didn't even invest the time yet to see what it is. I guess because I don't view ads, that's why I didn't know about it?
[looks it up]
Shit, we had free solutions for this already in the 90s. Why do people even try new ones, didn't they ever get anything working?
That said, the data sharing you can't opt out of is only related to third party services. Services suck, use files, not services. And it appears to be open source. But there is no apparent need to fork, just don't use third party services. Duh.
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The appeal to Plex is that it's everything in one place. If you have to go to multiple places, it's got less appeal.
It sure would be nice if the Kodi folks could get their library sharing stuff properly working and documented.
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Put your foot down (Score:1, Insightful)
No data leaves my devices without my explicit and informed consent.
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No data leaves my devices without my explicit and informed consent.
I hope you don't really believe that. Also, it should read "but we do not sell or share your personally identifiable statistics yet." And the whole point of big data for marketing companies is to turn that "non-identifiable statistics" into identifiable statistics.
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Length, rez, bitrate (Score:2)
Re:Length, rez, bitrate (Score:4, Informative)
Just listen to your customers instead of spying on them.
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then a feed like this is about the only way to know.
Really? how about just asking the fucking user base? voluntary survey's? even an OPT IN feature use monitoring? labelling the feature as deprecated and providing a feedback option? their are literally dozen of ways to collect this data without being a bunch of intrusive arseholes.
Betteridge's Law (Score:3, Insightful)
Apparently based on the headline, the answer is no.
The followup question, "should anyone keep using Plex?", should also be answered "no."
Re: Betteridge's Law (Score:1)
This is an abuse of Betteridge's Law. It's based on the observation that journalists who don't have enough evidence to confirm their suspicions may run with the story anyway and write the headline as a question to avoid accusations of libel. It's basically a form of clickbait and yellow journalism. The question in this headline is asking for your opinion, not indicating uncertainty about the facts. Betteridge's Law was never intended to apply to headlines like these. Taken to the extreme, every Ask Slashdot
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Betteridge's Law does not apply here.
I don't believe you. If it were true then you would have titled your post "Does Betteridge's Law apply here?"
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Par for the Course (Score:5, Insightful)
"Be concerned about your personal privacy!", we yell at people every day, while expecting them to flawlessly determine which violations are acceptable and not acceptable.
It's a pretty tall order, and when in doubt, turning off data collection across the board is the sensible thing to do. After all, keeping up with ever-changing TOS and user "Agreements" is, at this point, patently impossible ... and you never know when their data collection policies are going to change. We've all seen 1,000 times promises made, only to be broken later when the company is purchased, partnered, etc.
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Yeah, that's what the ToS says.
Now.
In a year, once they have a LOT of data on their users, the ToS can change again to allow sharing all data they have with their partners, subsidiaries, bedfellows etc.
I mean, we just saw right now that the ToS can change how they handle data, didn't we?
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Or, even better, don't use Plex.
No (Score:2)
n/t
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Fork or patch (Score:2)
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But once you find the right place to insert a few NOPs ... ...they have introduced an update with a fresh new binary.
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Or, you know, just pi-hole their telemetry domain (metrics.plex.tv)
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What do I think? (Score:2)
I think I made the right choice when I stopped using Plex a couple years ago. They've been heading down a path I don't particularly like for some time now.
But if you're happy with them, more power to you.
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> You realise that Slashdot makes use of plenty of analytics that phone home whenever you visit the site, right?
That's an assinine comparison. This is more like Google or Mozila spying on everything you do. Even that's a stretch because Plex is not a network application at all.
It doesn't work by connecting to the cloud and serving content like Netflix or Amazon Prime.
It's really more like Ubuntu or Microsoft spying on everything you do and phoning home to the mother ship.
What the hell is Plex? (Score:1)
Never heard of it before, like 99% of the crap /. takes for granted that everyone knows and uses.
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https://duckduckgo.com/?q=Plex
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That feature hasn't been relevant for years. Modern mobile devices are quite capable of playing content on their own.
The whole on-the-go "cloud" thing sound nice but suffers from horrible network issues. This buggers the actual streaming services too.
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And... I'll be able to fit maybe one 4k UHD movie on my media server on my phone that way, and it'll choke horribly trying to play it as it doesn't have the CPU power necessary in order to be able to decode it in real time.
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Doesn't Kodi have a Plex plugin? That should say something by itself about the quality of Kodi
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I would think it says less about the quality of Kodi and is more suggestive that Kodi and Plex are intended for different things.
Universal Media Server (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been pretty happy using Universal Media Server instead of Plex.
I checked them both out last year when looking for the best way to steam stuff from my network to my Samsung Smart TV, and I was much more comfortable with UMS. It's been working fine ever since for my purposes.
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Good-bye Plex (Score:2)
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I could opt out of the data collection.
You really believed that?
What do we think? (Score:3)
Time to update firewall rules (Score:2)
well ok then (Score:2)
Re: These comments. (Score:2)
I think the problem is that today they demonstrated they can switch the TOS then tomorrow add in the, yes we have a list of all your media files now.
One way to shut them down is to bring a lawsuit from a country with some type of data retention law that prohibits the export of user data.
Trying to get rid of life-time subscribers? (Score:5, Interesting)
This feels like Plex is trying to get rid of their old time lifetime subs. I'd imagine long time users of Plex are probably more technologically astute and more likely to care about this sort of privacy change... so why not change it, get delicious data and see if you can drop some of those guys that don't make you any more money. Nah... they wouldn't do that, right?
Stop overreacting. (Score:1)
Plex has made it ludicrously clear that the change of TOS only applies to the 3rd party apps for the purpose of ad-serving, in the scope of the apps only.
Two things here:
So, from what I can see, they are monitoring in the right way
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Plex has made it ludicrously clear that the change of TOS only applies to the 3rd party apps for the purpose of ad-serving, in the scope of the apps only.
You keep saying this as if it somehow makes the situation any better.
No (Score:3)
I really like Plex (Score:1)
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HELL. You could just point MythTV at that NAS and use it. It's really all down to how well the app in question handles re-scanning all of your media and dealing with the metadata.
Also not sure about the whole "ease of use thing" there.
Rube users tend to be good with what they are used to whatever that is. Doesn't matter what it is. Change even the theme and they go ape shit.
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The Plex server is a downloadable app for Synology NASes. It means the NAS itself runs the server software as well as holds the files, so you don't need another computer running all the time.
Plex is a LOT easier to set up than MythTV. It doesn't require a more-or-less-dedicated box, and there's a lot less fiddling involved.
The Good News is (Score:1)
The good news is that kodi is finally mature enough to to the 90% of same job without a central server. The live transcoding for low capability/power devices is a moot point for the majority of users, even the shittiest tablets are capable of 1080p
Also, once the items in your media library are originized and named well enough for plex, kodi will nave zero trouble presenting them.
Serviio (Score:2)
I don't have such Plex problems.
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There is also a paid for Pro edition which further enhances the possibilities of sharing content in your connected household.
You have to pay to get something as simple as auto-playing a movie split into multiple files or the web based media player. I'll just go back to Kodi.
There's Always Emby (Score:1)
Never used it personally, but from what I know, it's probably one of the closest replacements to Plex in terms of features and use. It's also open source, so if they ever wanted to try and do something like this, people could fork it.
YMMV, but I've been well served with either a SMB or NFS server and either an old PC or an nVidia Shield TV running Kodi. It's a client-side solution instead of server-side like Plex and Emby, but if you just make sure to encode everything to a format that your playback device
this is why... (Score:3)
This is why you shouldn't use services like this. Vote with your usage and drop plex, there are plenty of alternatives.
Pay me (Score:2)
Swedish Nazis (Score:3)
Guess who else didn't let people opt out of information collection? Hitler.
Fuck these Nazi-esque fucks.
Good for now, but later? (Score:4, Insightful)
" we do not sell or share your personally identifiable statistics"
So OK, unless the company signs a binding agreement with it's customers, in 6 months when the numbers are down they can decide to turn around and sell the data they have collected on you and you can't do a damn thing about it. Or in 2 years when a new CEO comes in and wants to boost profits to get a better bonus so they can buy the 52 foot yacht instead of the 35 footer, they can turn around and sell it. The bottom line is if the information gets collected, sooner or later it will get sold. The only way to really prevent this is for the company to destroy the data after a set time long enough to be used for their internal purposes, but short enough to prevent a money grab down the road.
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Also, let's keep in mind that they haven't said what counts as PII. If they're going by the usual definition of that, then it's a lie -- an awful lot of "non-PII" is, in fact, personally identifying.
And it's been demonstrated plenty of times that even data that is innocuous in isolation becomes personally identifying when combined with other data. So, really, the only "non-PII" is aggregate statistical information that you can't drill down to single instances of.
Pretty much standard practice now (Score:2)
I'd get a new cell phone and OPT-OUT of flurry.com (Google) now Yahoo, the major one to block. That cell phone ID number being godfathered.
Ads were stopped, now the TOS reads ads won't stop just target ads will not be presented.
https://support.google.com/ads... [google.com] adchoices mentioned will block ads if they are members but these are all cookies, blocking any cleaning out of ones browser.
Not being rooted as most aren't, a hosts file isn't possible; outside a router.
Plex: "I'm altering the deal.... (Score:1)
Pray I don't alter it any further...
GDPR (Score:2)
One wonders how this works for their European customers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
NEXT! (Score:2)
Thanks for the service, you were great while you were great.
NEXT!
Re: should be OPT IN (Score:1)
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I'm actually wondering if this is a red herring. If I see them remove the PlexPass Lifetime subscription and then offer to let PlexPass users still opt out of the collection, then I know it is.