Plex now want to SELL your personal data
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/Plex has always been trash imo. Far better open source options available.
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My suggestion: Get Symphonium in addition/to replace Finamp.
Much more advanced in what it can do.
Only downside: You can't exclude libraries. If you have a soundtrack-like library separate from the regular music library, it can't be separated.Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it!
Is it good with gapless playback? It isn’t as crucial for me as for some people who listen to live recordings etc, but it’s always nice to have and is a good sign for the quality of the player.
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Is Kodi still a thing? Been a while since I had a media server but I have another one in the works because fuck streaming services
Kodi exists however it's a client only, it is not made to host content. You are looking for jellyfin
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Kodi exists however it's a client only, it is not made to host content. You are looking for jellyfin
+1 for Jellyfin!
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Idunno why you don't think having an unique hash attatched to your data is no biggie. Especially if that hash is easily cracked in a few years by quantum computers.
Nobody is gonna be using a quantum computer to "crack email hashes" of Plex users in a few years... I'm not even sure there is a speedup to hash cracking with quantum computers.
But depending on the hashing algorithm used, it's likely pretty easy to crack hashes of email addresses today with a normal computer. They're not particularly high entropy.
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You can literally click “I do not agree” lol. Also the “personal data” is a hashed email (so they don’t get your email), ip address, and watch history. Not very “personal”, and not anything that violates your privacy or is of any concern to you.
wrote last edited by [email protected]I have no skin in this game, but IPs are definitely not anonymous data. Also there is a lot of great info out there about de-anonymizing seemingly random data. Interestingly enough, this is similar to the Netflix prize dataset that was one of the more famous ones. Maybe a good introduction to that would be https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/12/anonymity_and_t_2.html
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No, he provided details for his internet first. You're the one who came in comparing your business contract internet with his non-business one. Did you just conveniently forget that?
You need to scroll up and pay attention.
Them:
My ISP offers symmetrical [...] glad I'm not American
Me:
As someone living in America, I have great internet
Them:
<Requests direct information about cost>Me:
<I oblige>Them:
<makes a comparison without qualifying anything about the comparison, claiming theirs to be superior>Me:
<calls it out>They provided no details at all... this whole engagement. We still don't actually know what speeds they even get for their mere 28USD. Could be 100mbps and it would be significantly worse by ever metric than my 8gbps. I can't compare my service to something that we have no details for.
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/Meanwhile, poor Jellyfin just quietly doing the job.
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I mean, my Plex server is on a Fedora machine, it seems to be doing fine. I have gotten into arguments here about how frustrating it is that Linux advocates pretend every usability problem for Windows users is solved and that "just use Mint" is a valid solution to that issue. If you want to know how that goes, it goes a lot like this conversation.
On topic, using any external login or remote access third party service for your self hosted services is a significant change in how much info is not controlled by you, nobody is arguing that. There's a conversation to be had about whether that's worth it for most users. Like I said earlier, is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you? For most people I'd say yes, it's still a much safer, more flexible alternative to Google's or Amazon's ecosystem, so why not? Baby steps.
But if you're already using a commercial service that already has a proprietary login then no, it doesn't matter. Plex already knows which clients go to your server. It does not need Google for anything here, having Google's SSO doesn't give them any information they already have. It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you're just as boned. It's borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
As for the "I have nothing to hide" thing... look, if you want to have this argument with someone else go pester them instead. It's not "I have nothing to hide", it's "this commercial service that I use does something that is legal and I intend to both take advantage of that and defend my right to own my media". How you get "I have nothing to hide" out of that is your own pretzel logic.
I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use. I will exercise that right regardless of how many US corpos pretend that hey own the very concept of showing video to people. I am doing nothing illegal here and of the perfectly legal software options to do this perfectly legal thing I chose the one that had better usability for my family to be comfortable using it. This comes at the cost of an external service storing some of our data, just like our Netlfix and Disney+ subscriptions do, but since I'm not keeping a media server performatively that is a tradeoff we have made on a bunch of places because not everybody who lives here is willing to do homework to be able to use their devices. That cool with you?
For the record, I don't have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept. I do have remarkable contempt for people who want it to keep being a minority option because they like being in the secret treehouse and don't want everybody else learning about it. Widespread, successful FOSS doesn't look like half-baked UX and hobbyist programmers working for nothing in their spare time, and I would certainly like to see a landscape where alongisde hobby projects we have a solid stable of financially sustainable professionally made open source alternatives that anybody can get into. Jellyfin isn't even the worse offender here. If nothing else it's frustrating because it could be a more approachable sustainable alternative in the vein of your Blenders or Home Assistants... but it's kinda not, and that sucks.
I have gotten into arguments here
Yes, that was the joke
is it a good thing for Home Assistant to provide a paid subscription service that will handle that for you?
There are so many differences between HA and Plex that it's almost difficult to pick which one is most significant. All i'd say is - if plex was at all the same as HA, I would have zero problem with it. If jellyfin adopted HA's model of paid development, I'd be thrilled. But HA's strategy is actually pretty unique, it'll take time for that structure to be stress-tested and propagate.
It does not need Google for anything here, having Google’s SSO doesn’t give them any information they already have.
Yea but not really - google accounts are usually pretty specifically identifiable to a person/ad account/collected internet and device activity. Might not be a big deal to you, but having those things tied together is problematic on a number of levels. You can self-host an SSO, and you can also have a security-focused third-party SSO - both would be marginal improvements over using google's auth system in terms of privacy.
It does give that to Google, but if your concern is the cops are going to bang on your door for all your illegal pixels that you stream then you’re just as boned. It’s borderline irresponsible to pretend otherwise.
Yes, 100%. If you're at all concerned about privacy, plex is a terrible idea, with or without SSO. I'm glad you agree.
How you get “I have nothing to hide” out of that is your own pretzel logic.
"What i'm doing is perfectly legal so it doesn't matter if they have my detailed data". You're not hiding it because you think you don't need to - that's exactly the argument you're making. Every step toward data privacy is valuable, even if your total data hygiene practice isn't perfect. It still matters.
I have a right to store, backup and access my own media and to keep a copy of it for private use
Good for you. Most of us do not.
I’m not keeping a media server performatively
Neither am I, but I guess I do feel quite passionately about keeping it private and I'm not shy about advocating for the practice. Probably for the same reason you're very tight lipped about what country you're from - you don't necessarily think you'll get swatted if you do, just that it's a pointless detail to share with strangers if you don't have to. Most of my family doesn't care enough about not using netflix or disney+ that they're happy to keep using them if my offering is too complicated. I'm happy to help them set up and learn how the server works if they're interested, and a number of them have become enthusiastic self-hosters themselves as a result. If I was operating a mission-critical service on my server then maybe i'd care more about minimizing UX friction but since it's not, I'm happy with prioritizing privacy and control over polish. That's a pretty common mentality for a server administrator - i'm not running a SAAS here. At most I'm just the enterprise IT manager trying to keep the office slack channel running.
For the record, I don’t have any misgivings about FOSS as a concept.
You can say that, but boy oh boy is that hard to believe. You certainly don't think FOSS is worth any level of inconvenience. Looks to me like you're the kind of person who wants the best tool for every job, regardless of if you could get by with a middling one that supports a FOSS project. That's fine. I use adobe products for work because I can't really get by without it, but I still use GIMP or Inkscape when I can and I support those ecosystems with my time and money because it draws more people in. And I actually do want my FOSS tools to be built as side projects, at least at first. There's a place for polish and professional support, but a lot of this stuff needs to be built out and tested before that kind of thing happens. A lot of these projects act as beta testing for forks that will end up doing one thing really well to a high level of polish. Having a product that's maybe a little complicated but extremely accessible from a configuration standpoint lets more tech-minded people build on top of them and work toward more polished solutions.
But I certainly don't find VC backed projects entering into the FOSS space as a good thing. Maybe that competition drives positive movement in the open-sourced ones, but usually they turn out to be 'embrace, extend, extinguish' projects. Like, I don't think meta's Threads is a positive thing for federated social media, even though by this logic they are making it 'more mainstream' by their adoption of activitypub. There just isn't a way to separate the product they produce from the economic model they operate under, and plex has chosen a model that inevitably leads to enshittification and walled-off content gardens.
I just don't see any reason to blow smoke for plex. Their UX is fine (great, even), but they're doing basically everything else wrong. They're reliant on VC capital, they're collaborating with private media and tailoring their TOS to protect copyright holders, they're collecting data they don't need and forcing features that reduce privacy, they're changing their privacy policies to enable data sales and monetization, they're bait-and-switching users by placing popular free features behind paywalls, they're banning lifetime paid users for perfectly legal use of their services.... the list goes on and on. At some point, a company like Plex crosses the line from 'reasonable profit-seeking' to 'actively user-hostile', and I think they've already crossed that line. Maybe you think their UX is worth the abuse, but I certainly do not - not when there's a perfectly fine alternative that fits my needs and more.
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They can't delete everything they've collected and they propaply don't.
In a few years the "do not agree" will dissapear anyway.
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Didn’t even need to dig. As soon as I opened Plex in my browser, it gave me a giant full screen “hey we want to sell your data. Do you consent” page. I disagree with data sale in general, but at least they didn’t go out of their way to bury the opt out. In fact, they actually went out of their way to present the notification in a way that was impossible to miss. If you’re capable of reading, you’ll know what the popup is for.
Yeah, I mean this seems like much ado about nothing. Don't get me wrong...I'd prefer Plex never even attempt this, but they make it dead easy to opt out. There's literally an "All No" checkbox. It's been that way for a while. Every time someone posts another "Plex sux and steals your data!" thread, I check it and everything is still set to opt-out. They've never auto-opted-in anything, unlike how back when I still had a Facebook account I'd have to constantly re-opt-out of things because FB seemingly changed my settings to opt back in every time the moon entered its waning phase. Roku does that too. Every time I go into the "secret" menu and turn off ads and stuff, then there's a system update, you have to go turn that stuff back off.
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Just say you don't care about privacy and having all your data out there for anyone to do anything they want with.
“All your data” lol
I care about my actual private data. My email that I hand out to dozens of sites isn’t that. What movies/tv shows of Plex’s - not my collection - isn’t that. It’s definitely not an issue when it’s opt-in like this is.
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I'll look into Tailscale then. I'm guessing there's something funky about adding additional users. I would eventually like to add one or two other people.
I think the free tier lets you have three users. I ended up going with headscale so that could be wrong.
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They can if forced to, but they never have to do that normally. What you're telling people to do is make normal people do things they don't normally do when browsing the web and saying its as easy as making them sign up for a Plex account. Most people have done similar things as the latter, but they only have to type a full URL once or twice in their lifetime.
That is way beyond the comfort zone of most people I know. The general use case of web browser for normal people is googling the website they want and clicking the link while being blissfully unaware of what a URL is or does.
This does not mean they are mentally deficient, it just means they spend their mental processing and memory on other things they deem actually important.
How is someone who can't manage to copy and paste "www.my-jellyfin-server.com" into the address bar going to figure out where to get a Plex account?
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Stopped using plex, replaced with jellyfin
Do they have the same features?
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I’ve had a lifetime plex pass for several years. Once I tried Jellyfin a few months ago it was all over. My “I’ll run both just in case” period lasted a week or two.
The downside is that Jellyfin will take more setup on your end, especially if you want to let other people connect securely to your server.
The upside is performance and responsiveness. Once I started using it I decided Plex had to go, even if I have to drive to each family member’s house to fix their shit. It was like moving between Linux and Windows, as far as one being designed to work and the other being designed to satisfy dozens of corporate KPIs.
Fortunately the setup for the end user is just as simple once your server is good to go. They just need URL, login, and password.
And since it’s all open source, there’s some fun diversity in clients. I use Finamp specifically for music, and there are audiobook focused ones.
I don't even use remote sharing local access only.
What I cannot do without is, resume and watch history.
Skip intro.
Category management of the library.
Does jellyfin support these 3 items?
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And just like that we’re at silly made up hypothetical situations to drive fear and an agenda. That’s not even worth entertaining.
It's all hypothetical until it isn't anymore. You're literally the slowly boiled frog.
So how long before you admit you’re wrong? If they don’t sell it in 2 years? 5 years? 10 years?
You’re literally spreading FUD based on your paranoia.
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Damn it damn it damn it!! I can't use Jellyfin because...its what I watch all my porn on. Plex was used for all the family stuff. Mother fuckers! Greed is a bitch.
Edit: Wait..what if we are using a VPN...shouldnt we be good then?This is basically my exact situation lol
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Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it!
Is it good with gapless playback? It isn’t as crucial for me as for some people who listen to live recordings etc, but it’s always nice to have and is a good sign for the quality of the player.
Didnt notice anything special with gapless. But I only have one album that is peimary gapless. Thus I am no metric to count on. Best you check yourself as you can refund the app if it doesnt fit your needs
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Text:
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex’s advertising partners. This data is used to deliver personalised ads and content, ad and content measurement, audience insights and product development. Your consent applies to all devices on which you have Plex installed. You can withdraw your consent at any time in
Account Settings or using this page.Soure: https://www.plex.tv/vendors/
(Might have to clear cache)Can also read about the changes here:
https://www.plex.tv/about/privacy-legal/I have a lifetime Plex pass but still I am considering switching.
Currently I have both Jellyfin and Plex on the same libraries but Jellyfin doesn’t have support for chromecast (on iOS and Firefox) nor support for offline . (Not) covering neither my at home nor travelling use cases
