PLEX Privacy Problem.

At the begin­ning of Novem­ber 2023, PLEX enabled some new fea­tures that have turned out to be a bit of a PR and Pri­vacy nightmare.

Basic­ally, they’ve star­ted email­ing all mem­bers of a PLEX serv­er with the recent view­ing habits of oth­er mem­bers of that serv­er. Even if the mem­bers don’t know each oth­er, PLEX appar­ently reset pri­vacy set­tings to allow this kind of inform­a­tion shar­ing. It’s a long read but the full sup­port thread is here, but here’s what you need to do to turn this ‘fea­ture’ off:

Per-user account settings

These need to be repeated under each reg­u­lar (i.e. not “man­aged”) user account.

1. to dis­able the bar that says “Activ­ity by X” on all your movie and TV show pre­play pages: go here https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/online-media-source and scroll down. Dis­able “DISPLAY ACTIVITY FROM MY FRIENDS ON DETAIL PAGES”
2. to dis­able all those free media sources: go here https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/online-media-sources and dis­able all the sources under “Gen­er­al” you don’t want.
   Hint: “Dis­abled for man­aged users” will not dis­able it for you, since you are a reg­u­lar user, not a man­aged one.
3. on the same set­tings page, you can dis­able Dis­cov­er as well
4. set the Watch His­tory, Watch­list, Rat­ings, Friends List to “private” by going here https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/profile/edit scroll to the bot­tom and “Edit” the Pri­vacy Set­tings. In the same dia­log, set the Account Vis­ib­il­ity to “Friends only”. Save.
5. on this page https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/settings/account you can dis­able the syncing of “Watched” data and Rat­ings from your per­son­al Plex serv­er to your account. This will render most of the things in 4) almost useless.
   How­ever, this will also pre­vent your account from syncing back these status data to a second or replace­ment Plex serv­er of your own. (And to serv­ers which are shared with you.)
6. Go through your list of Plex friends https://app.plex.tv/desktop/#!/friends and remove those from which you don’t wish to see any activity.
   Plex Friend­ship and media shar­ing are now sep­ar­ate things – i.e. you can keep on shar­ing your media with them.
7. Veri­fy the email noti­fic­a­tion set­tings for your account as well and adapt them to your wishes: https://www.plex.tv/email-preferences