Plex now want to SELL your personal data
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What is wrong with Jellyfin's TV app? I use it on my Android TV and I don't have any problems
Not available for my Samsung or the kid's Visio TVs
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NordVPN is better than Mullvad
Off topic, but what? Is Nord doing wacky shit with network settings?
I'm not a security expert but my guts (and the many things I read about this stuff over many years) tell me that cheap highly marketed VPNs like Nord seek the less informed users that sign up because half of their favorite youtubers sent them there, the default M.O. is install the (proprietary) app. It might be possible to use them safely but it's not what's happening to 99% of the customers.
They operate in grey legal areas, there are many scandals over the years, they write in their TOS that they can change the terms themselves without notice, if you use their service, you agree at any time.
When I wrote that they do what they want w your network, this is what I'm referring to; idk about the "settings", more like selling access to your residential line (perhaps to other VPN customers)
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And that makes a difference to you?
It does, yeah.
If they are providing the content, they can see that they are providing the content and that much is obvious.
If you are providing the content, you wouldn't expect that they can identify what you are watching.
That's the difference to me, yeah.
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Understandable. I don't worry that much myself since I haven't heard anything bad happening yet. And with ro rights to media, potential damage at least should be pretty limited.
And with ro rights to media, potential damage at least should be pretty limited.
Depends entirely on where you live I would think.
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I wonder if having a “sign in” page within jellyfin that just fronts a wireguard configuration panel, saves the creds, and automatically connects and routes app traffic over the vpn iface is a remotely viable idea.
That sounds good to me, we use wireguard in the family when out and about to access my homeserver, but I'd love if Jellyfin could create ad-hoc tunnels, it'd make us feel safe enough sharing our libraries with friends, perhaps it will convince many Plex users too. What are funkwhale users doing to share their music for example?
The other commenter wrote about STUN servers (IP), I've seen that Syncthing uses them as well, together with discovery and relay servers. Would wireguard be used at any of this stages or standalone? Personally I have no idea, I'm just an observant user
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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
I think you can use Infuse on iOS to chromecast. I’m not sure if that’s behind the subscription though.
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Also a lifetime Plex holder. Plex wouldn't let me watch my local content without authenticating the other day... But my internet went out and I couldn't. Decided I'd swap to Jellyfin the first chance I could (couldn't that day because no internet)... So that's what I did today. It was painless and I'm never going back to Plex.
Disclaimer, I don't need access outside of my house so I didn't set any of the remote stuff up.
Yeah, if you’re 100% local, that’s basically the ideal use case for Jellyfin. Plex really shines when it comes to remote access. But if you never use that, then there’s very little reason to use it over Jellyfin.
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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/wrote last edited by [email protected]Oh, you expect proprietary software to behave nicely? That’s cute!
I’ll just be over here with Jellyfin, watching the chaos unfold with my popcorn!
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It does, yeah.
If they are providing the content, they can see that they are providing the content and that much is obvious.
If you are providing the content, you wouldn't expect that they can identify what you are watching.
That's the difference to me, yeah.
Mmmmm gross.
I'll leave you with this, though. Shit like this is all goalposts. For now it's just "their" content and not yours. But in 12 months it's gonna be all content. And what excuse will you make for them, then?
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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/The downfall of Plex needs to be compiled into an 80 minute YouTube video with sponsors spaced in for NordVPN and Viagra
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It literally gives you a gigantic “hey we want to sell your data. Do you want to allow that” prompt when you open it. They didn’t even make the “no, don’t sell my data” button grey and tiny like so many cookie prompts do. Plex went out of their way to put it up front and center, instead of quietly burying it in an obscure opt-out. There are plenty of perfectly valid complaints about Plex… But if a company wants to sell my data, (and here’s a spoiler warning: They all want to) this is how it should be handled.
Interesting. I'll have to look for that. I don't believe I've actually seen the prompt yet.
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Not sure if you understand this or not, but you using, or not using jellyfin doesn't affect anyone but you.
️If you don't wanna use it, then don't use it. You're still wrong, but that's up to you lil buddy.
Sure thing zelot
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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/Got rid of Plex a long time ago. Trash ass program
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"enshittification wont happen to my software of choice"
hahahaha... those ppl with discord, iphones, windows,plex....they wont learn.
android is risking enshittification too if google keeps trying to close down it's development. nothing is safe unless it is free of greedy corporations
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Yeah it was over after pixel 3 or a little before iirc! Although to me it was obvious they would eventually kill it off because that's soooo much storage. It was just a trick to get people bought into Google photos (which is a great service but much too expensive for me and now basically totally replaced by Immich)
damn I've been out of the loop on that one for a while! Agreed, I set up Immich and it's pretty much a drop-in replacement now
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Yeah it was over after pixel 3 or a little before iirc! Although to me it was obvious they would eventually kill it off because that's soooo much storage. It was just a trick to get people bought into Google photos (which is a great service but much too expensive for me and now basically totally replaced by Immich)
How has immich been compared to photoprism? My issue with immich is that new releases kept breaking things. Has it finally stabilized? Lts are super important to me as I don’t want to spend every weekend reconfiguring services for my family.
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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’m a big fan of Jellyfin. I would say it is easily family approved. That is for my family in my household who is using it on our home Wi-Fi.
But I am not about to expose it publicly. I have WireGuard set up on my immediate family’s devices and that is mostly ok (until you get on a public Wi-Fi that fails because you haven’t gone through their portal and can’t because the vpn is on, or you are on an airplane’s Wi-Fi with no internet trying to watch their movies and it doesn’t work until you turn off the vpn). Explaining this to my wife has been a nonstop battle.
I’d like it open it up to my siblings families, especially because I have the ersatztv plug-in to create approved child stations, but so many smart tvs and devices don’t support a vpn. How have others handled that situation?
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How has immich been compared to photoprism? My issue with immich is that new releases kept breaking things. Has it finally stabilized? Lts are super important to me as I don’t want to spend every weekend reconfiguring services for my family.
I'm new to self hosting and I've only used it for about a month. During the last month all updates have been stable for me! But according to their roadmap they plan to do their official "stable" release a little later this year, so you could wait until then?
Also I'm running it in docker so that might help
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How has immich been compared to photoprism? My issue with immich is that new releases kept breaking things. Has it finally stabilized? Lts are super important to me as I don’t want to spend every weekend reconfiguring services for my family.
Forgot to mention- can't compare to photo prism as I've never used it!
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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.
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.
Well, hey, there we agree, then. I'd say that the setup for HA is actually fairly Mozilla-like, and people don't seem thrilled with THAT, so it wasn't a given you'd agree. Plex certainly isn't that. For one thing it's commercial and closed source. But crucially HA's commercial branch WILL have a bunch of your data, including voice processing and login info, if you do buy into their paid subscription service.
As for the rest of the argument, most is redundant so I'm not gonna go through the loop again, I am actually busy. But I will add a few things. For one thing, whether I think FOSS is worth "any level of inconvenience" is irrelevant. I do, and I do live with the inconvenience in some cases. But if the goal is for FOSS to be mainstream and a primary choice (and it can absolutely be, there are plenty of examples), then it doesn't matter what I think. The reason the privacy tradeoffs make sense for Plex is that Plex is an app your family is likely to use. Mine does, and they sure won't put up with bad UX for the sake of using an open alternative. OBS didn't crush Xsplit out of the market because of ideology, it did it because it became more powerful, usable and reliable.
And let me clarify I don't "blow smoke for Plex". I opened this whole subthread by saying I wanted to use Jellyfin (hence all the testing we've been nitpicking about) but couldn't justify it. I've said this above. I'd drop Plex in a heartbeat if Jellyfin was just as good to use for me and the rest of my household. But it isn't. There's no reason to blow smoke for Plex, but there is a reason to not delusionally pretend that open source alterantives are better than they are. You're not going to gaslight normies into using them that way and the complacency just makes it less likely for them to succeed at what they're trying to do. It is, after all, the year of Linux desktop.
