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/
You are correct, I don’t care about any of that either. And I know about the boilerplate. Bud.
You need to agree with yourself about what you’re arguing. Are you saying that the problem is the SSO or Plex?
Because if Plex will go tell on you it will do it based on the data they have internally, not based on any data captured by the login flow, so the SSO is not additional issue compared to using Plex without the Google login and using the email login instead.
And if you’re arguing that the SSO is the problem and not Plex which you indignantly reminded me is what the thread was about, then you’re arguing against yourself, because it sure seems we agree that if Plex is going to take any action against you illegally sharing files through their system (which, by the way, they are legally obligated to do) it won’t be due to the Google login at all, which is just a bit of convenience and doesn’t seem to provide anybody with any data they don’t already have.
Once again, you are super keen on playing up hypotheticals. Once again, the biggest issue with those hypotheticals is that Plex boots me out… of Plex. I am not doing anything illegal with it or even breaching their EULA, including the paragraphs you quote (not that something being written down in an EULA makes it applicalbe, but still). I will bite that bullet and live with Jellyfin’s implementation if and when that happens. Which it likely won’t.
There’s a problem with SSO’s and there’s a problem with Plex. Go back and read the conversation - that’s not the problem with plex, it’s a problem. Someone said they don’t trust google login, and you were indignant about why that might be, and I was exceedingly patient with explaining why it’s a problem. I like that jellyfin does not provide a google SSO, because I can choose a better, less invasive one as a server admin. I’ve not said anything contradictory here, you’ve just been willfully misreading shit.
just fucking read the words I so kindly found for you in the TOS (not that it fucking matters if it’s a tos or a eula anyway). It’s also not a fucking hypothetical, Plex has already been exercising this. But I don’t give a fuck if you’re concerned about it, i’m just telling you why so many people are taking issue with it. And given that they’ve already demonstrated that they collect detailed data about your personal library and watching habits, it is certainly not out of the question that they could now sell that data as a part of their new privacy policy.
Unless you live in a country without a copyright agreement with the US, you are absolutely liable under this. I have no idea if you do or not, but I’d venture a guess that most people here do. Good for you if it doesn’t apply.
I don’t give a shit what software you use.
I have absolutely not been willfully misreading. You can’t argue that the guy saying he has a problem with Google’s sign-in specifically has a point and also say that the data mining happening within Plex is WAY more intrusive. If the point is whether giving Google this data is a problem it must be worse than using any of the other sign-in options. But it isn’t. Your data is as widely available one way or the other. It is reasonable to think Plex’s visibility over your server is too much, I accept that, particularly if your use case runs afoul of their EULA…
…but then you can’t tell me “I don’t trust Google”, unless your argument is you trust Plex more for some reason. Which you shouldn’t. It just doesn’t follow.
Oh, and they do sell your data for advertising. There’s an opt-in for it, though. Since we’re talking about legality, it’d be a punishable offense for them to sell your data without your consent, which is why that’s there, and they do need to tell you what data they collect if you request it.
And no, I am not liable under US law. There is a treaty that requires both parties to meet those requirements, but US law isn’t directly applicable over here. What is applicable is our own legislation made to comply with those trade agreements. Which includes exemptions for private copy.
As far as I and every piece of legal advice I’ve seen about this knows, anyway. If you have a source for how apparently US law is directly applicable to any country they have a trade agreement with feel free to point me to this insane new paradigm of international law, though.
Those are not mutually exclusive statements. In fact, mostly it just makes you an idiot for not having a problem with either.
It is worse than an auth method that isn’t maintained by a known data whore like google. It’s substantially worse when you’re using it with another data whore service. For those of us who administrate remote services and care about not being beholden to google’s data addiction, it is absolutely not a good thing to provide it as the default auth method, which is what the OP was saying. Even if jellyfin included it, I would immediately disable it. Especially since, as a server administrator, I have a vested interest in keeping the activity of that server private. Even if the specific details of the media on it aren’t exposed, I don’t want any party with conflicting interests to my own to know what users are associated with my server. Just having a dozen or so users connected through jellyfin to my IP would be enough for a motivated legal entity to look at me, and I have more than just a private media server to worry about. Is it likely to happen? Probably not. But why would I even risk it?
I don’t have a source for you, but typically using a US-based platform can give US authorities a jurisdictional hook, especially if the rights holders are US-based or can show commercial harm. That is why US based web services are extraordinarily strict with all of their users, even those who live outside the US. I’m not even saying it’s common, just that it could happen. I seem to remember operators of p2p services getting nabbed at customs while traveling back in the day - it wasn’t illegal where they were, but it sure as fuck was in the US and they were extremely interested in putting the kabash on it.
No question that plex is a more convenient service, but if you have the tech literacy to manage something that’s completely private that is only marginally more complicated, why the fuck wouldn’t you? Then again, maybe if you think you’re more tech literate than you are, it doesn’t seem all that simple.
Man, you keep thinking that taking digs about how it’s all a skill issue is either an argument or an insult, and I keep reminding you that even if there was a skill issue at play (and there wasn’t), being hard or annoying to use is the actual problem. If your UX allows for skill issues in making a straightforward setup run then it’s a UX issue.
Also, me using Plex to host copies of my own media legally is not the same as operating a P2P service. But if it’s any consolation I have no intention to set foot on that hellhole anyway, given that US authorities seem to not need copyright overreach to throw you in a room with no windows indefinitely these days. Good luck with that.
Oh, and yes, those are mutually exclusive. Or mutually inclusive, to be more accurate. If your concern is the govenrment overreach implications of having a portion of your data leaked, worrying about a smaller leak along the way of actively generating a larger leak is entirely pointless. Conversely, I’d argue that if you have a dozen users and are terrified that the cops are going to come and raid the… I’m gonna say meth lab you’re running on the side, we’re back to the conversation about how cool you are with that dozen users having their Jellyfin clients running on a bunch of Android devices, Smart TVs, Windows boxes or whatever else.
Again, I keep struggling with the irony of this weird position having entirely bought into the narrative that self-hosting media is inherently illegal or dangerous. I came into this argument from the UX angle, you guys are increasingly convincing me that a significant disincentive for self-hosting to become mainstream is that its entire community is convinced that they are doing something wrong, apparently. It’s not that I hadn’t noticed how central to the whole thing a bunch of P2P-specific paraphernalia happens to be, but I wasn’t ready for the gatekeeping to come with a side of edgy 90s we’re-so-bad hack-the-world stuff.
I’m not explaining this to you again. What you described is not legal on a US hosted service like Plex, and even most other countries with DRM exceptions for personal use do not include sharing outside your immediate household. Even if it’s perfectly legal in your country, and the US can’t touch you where you are, Plex is still obligated to abide by US restrictions. Good enough if that doesn’t bother you, but it isn’t completely without risk and you should be well aware of it.
What exactly does “government overreach” mean in this context?
Using Google SSO independently is bad. Plex independently is bad. Using both together is worse. Using either while also breaking the law, when there’s a perfectly acceptable way to do neither of those things and still just as easily break the law is a whole lot better.
I’m just not a dumbass. Having a dozen users log in without any of them publicly pointing at me or my server IP is a hell of a lot safer than letting a private service log every sign-in and stream event of the server, and then letting a separate private service link those users to accounts with detailed personal information. Those people can install jellyfin on their phones and tablets all they want - google wouldn’t know what servers those clients are connecting to anyway. And even if they did, my server is not associated with my personal details or ISP-assigned IP address. Maybe you just didn’t know that, idk.
Using a google SSO isn’t a prerequisite for self-hosting becoming mainstream. Maybe SSO generally is, but there are a dozen other ways to achieve the same thing. Maybe I don’t care if it becomes mainstream? Maybe what I actually want is for people to learn tech self-sufficiency so that we’re not indefinitely reliant on SAAS. Maybe i’m content with my special little hobby and I’d rather point and laugh at people who get fucked over by services they delude themselves into believing won’t ever screw them, just because they can’t be bothered to learn a new skill.
If you’re as concerned with self-hosting becoming as mainstream as you claim you are, then I’d imagine you’d be more concerned with the late-stage capitalist reality of media distribution and the increasingly restrictive laws surrounding its use. Where I live, the legal structure that protects the right to self sufficiency is very much under question, and continues to get worse. I got burned several times in the napster/limewire days, before it was established precedent that sharing digital copyright material was illegal, and unheard of still that anyone actually got punished for it. I know better than most that you can’t count on those protections indefinitely.
But as an anarchist, I think a little bit of crime is good, actually. More people should be doing crime. But if you’re gonna do it, do the rest of us a favor and don’t be a dumbass about it.
You are saying many things about the legality of this, especially internationally and regarding what Plex is or isn’t obligated to do, that are a bit of a stretch. But man, are they put in context by the admission of left wing cosplay there at the end where you concede you do think “a little bit of crime is good, actually”, which explains a lot of the hack the world mentality and why you feel so cool and dangerous by sharing some torrents you got with a slightly larger group of people than your direct family.
I still do think that’s counterproductive if you ever want a scenario where the late-capitalist media distribution landscape gets at least a modicum of competition from more reasonable and sustainable alternatives. That you prefer to feel edgy than to propose a viable scenario for that is all well and good, but I wish you didn’t feel the need to do that at people.
For the record, you are still wrong about SSO. Again it makes sense that if you’re cosplaying cops and robbers “this thing bad, this thing bad, both together worse” sounds reasonable, but if you really were at risk of any real legal liability that’s really not how that would play out. In the real world ANY leak of that information from any source would be an absolute problem. So the Google login could be a problem by itself, and the Plex data gathering would be a much bigger problem by itself, but both together would just mean you are exactly as screwed as with just one.
But you think it’s cool to crap on Google (which I guess it is) and are cosplaying, so that’s a cool thing to perform outrage about even if it doesn’t really matter in this scenario. Which I’m increasingly realizing is all this conversation is about, from the “I’m so good at networking and system administration” braggadocio to the “I’m such a dangerous anarchist criminal that doesn’t give a crap about the rules because I’m so good they can’t catch me” stuff.
FWIW, I do care about self-hosting as a viable commercial alternative and about a legal framework to support it, but even if I didn’t think it was possible (which it is, and some people at least are working along those lines) I am not ready to give up on the changes required to get there just to feel cool on the Internet. You do you, though, just… try not to scare the normies away. Not that there are any normies around here anyway, so I guess we’re safe on that front.
That’s almost exactly what I was saying, except that using both actually increases your risk just by capturing more detailed logs of your server activity and the associated accounts. Your users could use anonymous usernames or share login credentials if they wanted to without it, but being forced to use google SSO means each user is personally identifiable even if they’re protecting themselves otherwise. It’s the same reason I would never use google’s SSO for another web service if I had an alternative, even if for something completely innocuous. Why give them extra information about my web activity and tie it directly to my verified account, even if it’s something trivial like what plex servers i use or how I’m watching my media and on what devices?
But mostly my point was that using google’s SSO by itself, with your own self-hosted server is dumb because it unnecessarily exposes you where you otherwise would have been fine. That was the whole point of this conversation - not that plex was specifically bad because they used it, but that it isn’t a desirable feature for plex or for a self-hosted alternative. Maybe you just misunderstood that, idk.
Where I am people are being black bagged for less than just breaking DRM. I could be disappeared on my way to work tomorrow just for saying something silly like “from the river to the sea”. Maybe you’re privileged enough to feel secure in your legal standing, but that’s not one that I share. Like I said, i’ve gotten burned for using napster when I was young and dumb, and I thought I was safe then, too.
For most people this side of the pacific, ripping DVD’s for personal use is not legal, and streaming them to others is even less so. Any service hosted within the US is subject to that law. You being outside the US but using a private service hosted within it puts you squarely within that jurisdiction, but since you fancy yourself a lawyer, and since IDGAF anyway, i’ll let you mull it over for yourself. If all you’re afraid of losing is access to your plex account then all the power to ya. I just don’t agree with that value judgement.
I’m honestly not sure why you feel so cavalier about your data privacy. If you’re really one of those ‘i’ve got nothing to hide’ folks, I have a larger gripe with you than what a silly ‘plex vs jellyfin’ debate can cover. It’s incredibly shortsighted and normalizes apathy and complacency. There’s no reason to be exposing your private server usage data to private for-profit companies, especially when that activity is already borderline legal at best. My actual fear is that plex gains mainstream attention and comes under legal scrutiny. we go through another tightening of the screws because our bloated media market is bleeding and dragging the rest of the stock market down with it. That’s what happened with napster and the record industry, and it’ll happen with streamers and plex if we’re not a little more discrete.
Yes, rip your dvds. Yes, share them with whoever you want. Go pirate some animes or download a car, IDGAF. But don’t pretend like you’re somehow safe from punitive copyright action just because you’re off in Greenland or whereverthefuck. You’ll end up teaching normies bad habits and poor judgement when it comes to protecting their data privacy.
Again, just don’t be a dumbass about it.
Well there you go. I would really rather self-hosting not even be commercial.
Lmao yes look at me and my data hygiene, you’ll never be as cool as me. It’s clear that you have some misgivings about FOSS as a concept, I guess you can feel good about donating your money to a for-profit entity as a way to stick it to those hippies. God forbid I had tried selling you on linux in this thread, that could have really snowballed.
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.