Last Friday the more than 15 million users of Plex received an email in which we were warned that the privacy policy of the service was to change from September 20. They published in their blog a summary with all the news of this update and there was a point that did not like anything neither in the Plex forum nor in Reddit.

To understand the use throughout the Plex ecosystem and how we can improve it, Plex will continue to collect usage statistics, such as the type of device, duration, bit rate, formed of the files, resolution, type of files (music, photos, videos). , etc.). We will not allow the option to share these statistics from now on.

They updated shortly after with a “although we do not sell or share your personal and identifiable statistics” right after the last sentence, but the doubt was planted: if you can no longer choose not to share the data, is it possible that, in fact, they are selling them to third parties?

Why do you eliminate the option of not sharing data?

Keith Valory, CEO of Plex, was forced to publish a new article in which he explained point by point most of the issues that users were making about this change in privacy policy. Of course, one of the issues was to answer why they will no longer allow the user to decide not to share their usage data:

While reviewing the changes, we came to the conclusion that providing the option of not sharing the data gave a false sense of privacy and felt as if it were not sincere on our side. That is to say, even if you chose not to share your data, there was a handful of information that we kept gathering and that we call exceptions. So instead of listing all the exceptions, we decided: 1) to make it even clearer that we do not collect data that tells us what is in your library; 2) eliminate the option of not sharing above all to be clearer and more direct (but also clarifying that these data are clearly useful); and 3) be very transparent with what we do and what we do not do with the data (including Section F of the new policy, which prohibits us from selling your data).

In the exceptions that Valory commented there were questions such as “servers connect to the cloud to check for updates” or “customers talk to the cloud to discover how to connect remote servers”, so it does make sense to decide to be honest and Remove the option because, in any case, they were collecting our data.

In short, and according to them: Plex will not be able to know the content you have in your library , but, if you use third-party services included in the platform (CNN, History Channel, Comedy Central, etc), then they will know what you are watching, from what device, etc.

Oh yeah? And why should we trust? Plex this time has gone ahead and says it will change the privacy policy again with three new key points:

• Generalize data. They will round up the statistics so that the data is not so specific and the “footprint” of each user can not be identified.
• Option not to share the data of the contents of your local library.
• List with all the data that is collected. All the data collected will be listed and the user will be offered the option of not sharing those with which they are not comfortable.

Applause for Plex for listening to the concerns of their community and for being so quick with the changes.