Plex - how bad is it for privacy?

[anon29374801]

With the creation of a Media Management section underway and the recent changes to Plex, including its Privacy Policy, I am wondering how much of a privacy issue is Plex for personal media.

They state clearly that

Personal media users: We do NOT, and will not, share or sell any information about your personal media or use of a personal media server, and, as we’ve consistently stated, we don’t even collect information about content or titles in your personal media library or what content is played from a personal server.

I understand it probably would not make sense to recommend Plex on Privacy Guides but I would be interested to get peoples thoughts on it as it is a popular personal media manager that I am sure users of this site either use or have used / interacted with.

[anon36940904]

Well, it’s not great for privacy but don’t think its horrible necessarily either if you simply use it for what it is for - streaming your media.

But if you don’t already have the lifetime access, I would not buy into it today. Jellyfin works better for me and is also FOSS.

[anon29374801]

@anon36940904

it’s not great for privacy

I hear/read this a lot, can you provide a bit more specifics?

[anon36940904]

Oh boy.. I don’t have a list or anything. But seeing its not open source, that itself is enough of a reason to consider it not great but not horrible either since it is somewhat still popular.

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

Personally I do use Plex, currently. Since alternatives exist though which better fit our general criteria (i.e. preferring open source) and there are no privacy advantages to using Plex, I don’t see a need to include it on the website.

The biggest reason to not recommend Plex IMO is to avoid this issue:

Avoiding the next Skiff

Continuing the discussion from Remove Skiff: I think clearly there is some need to define a criteria to weed out technically proficient products that secretly aren’t in it for the long-term. There are of course many examples of this: Skiff, Keybase, Ello, Krypt[.]co, etc. The problem is of course where to draw that line. IMHO, the most promising possibility to me at the moment is to simply reject VC funded projects (I’m going to merge the discussion about that into this topic below, so you can…

[anon29374801]

@jonah

there are no privacy advantages to using Plex, I don’t see a need to include it on the website.

We are on the same page there.

@jonah

The biggest reason to not recommend Plex

Just to make sure I understand, you are saying the biggest reason not to recommend Plex is that after Skiff, PG does not want to recommend VC funded projects if possible?

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

“IMO” is doing some heavy lifting here because I don’t think PG has determined a stance on this.

[anonymous306]

Plex did the cardinal sin a decade ago

I strongly encourage any users to move towards Jellyfin.

edit: I honestly don’t remember what the bug was, something network related, but I was very unhappy with it and purged it.

[anon29374801]

Got it. I will mark your answer as the solution as its most relevant to PG users.

BUT I am hopeful others will chime-in, as I just wanted peoples opinions about Plex. I think a lof of people who will use the eventual Media Management section might be Plex users.

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Maybe this is obvious but can you expand on

@anonymous306

Plex did the cardinal sin a decade ago

[GorujoCY]

there’s also the increased prices that got in the news
and not to mention the countless issues linus has reported on. I would regardless avoid recommending plex. It’s not bad privacy wise for sure but it’s more on that side, lack of QoL and Bug fixing and more shoving things we didn’t ask for and increasing prices.

[anon29374801]

@GorujoCY

there’s also the increased prices that got in the news

Yeah a lifetime pass was $90 when I bought it in December 2021. $250 is crazy.

Paywalling remote access was an awful move. The non privacy reasons to use an alternative have always been much more clear to me.