I just can’t get the netflix one to work! I enter my details and flashes and then brings me right back to the sign in again! No other options…
US Eastern (Atlanta, GA)
I was able to link Prime account back, but not through Android. Had to use iPhone to achieve this. So I have 3 services linked but none seem to scrobble or sync history. Prime says never, while Hulu and Netflix ran on initial linking and hasn’t synced anything since.
So, as is my habit, I looked a little deeper into this feature by going to the Younify website. I noticed a lot more services available with Younify. So, my assumption is you picked these services as a beta to see how well Younify works.
I also hooked up the Plex scrobbler.
I have some “private” films on my Plex server.
Is there a way (aside from the checkmarks) to restrict what is scrobbed from Plex?
Realizing that things like Movies Anywhere and Fandango at Home are not “streaming services,” is there a similar features planned for such services?
No matter the answer to any of these questions, I love trakt as a service and this addition is fantastic. Thanks for keeping to improve the product.
Given that you have to use the app to sync the various accounts, does the actual syncing only work if you used the same device (the cell phone) to watch Netflix or Hulu or whatever? I use the Trakt app to record watching but I do not watch anything on my phone.
The Younify privacy policy has been updated with this additional sentence. I also think the word “collect” might be misleading. The password is collected in the sign in form, but it is not saved.
The email Netflix sends is triggered by signing in using a mobile browser on your device, not by the Younify service. I believe you would get the same email by signing in via web browser directly.
Any important action (i.e. purchasing something) on Amazon would require human interaction, signing in, 2FA, etc. I don’t see how it would be possible simulate that.
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It should work in any country where that service is natively available. Please send more details and a screen recording to support@trakt.tv if possible.
I will need to check on that, I assume it’s somewhat variable and not exactly every 24 hours.
Yes, we plan to add all the remaining services over the coming weeks.
No config on the Trakt side to limit what is scrobbled. I’m not sure on Plex, maybe you can make a separate library, but not sure if that would restrict scrobbling.
No, you can watch it normally on your TV or whatever device.
There is a lot of great discussion in this thread and we’ll continue improving this feature. I’ll be out of the office all of next week, so that’s why you won’t see any replies from me for a bit. You can always email support@trakt.tv with any issues too.
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As the linked article (only briefly) mentions: it totally depends on the scope attached to the token (which might be way too broad; we don’t know whether it only allows reading “watched” history or gives full account access).
If the password never leaves your device, the token has to; you need something to authenticate at a service to get to your data on their servers (or the service has terribly bad security).
(Unless you use advanced technology such as Secure Remote Password, which 1Password does, but it’s unlikely a service like Netflix or Amazon uses this)
Out of interest, what’s the new device that you’re seeing registered?
For myself using Trakt on iOS, I receive a message saying that I have a new device which is “iPhone Safari - Mobile browser”.
What’ll probably be happening there is that the Younify SDK (which pops up with the prompt to login to Netflix) is using an iOS webview which uses Safari under the hood.
For most websites that serve login notifications, a new device doesn’t always literally mean a new physical device but just any browser that hasn’t been seen before.
When the login happens locally, Netflix’s login page will presumably be seeing that it’s technically running inside Safari (but a slightly different copy of Safari than the main one) and will issue the email about a new device.
The same is true for Android and Google Chrome where the Android Webview is technically an instance of Google Chrome although slightly different.
As far as the rest of the integration, I have a pretty good idea of how Younify probably works although to be clear, I’m not affiliated with Trakt or Younify. I’m just a Trakt user who happens to be a software engineer by day. That said, I’ll need a bit of time to poke around under the hood and do some tests so I can be as accurate as possible with any explanations/theories.
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ok, the privacy policy update now states that Younify won’t store the password. we have to trust them (but in the above lines there is still written that “they collect email, phone number and password associated with streaming media account you choose to connect”, so which one is true? in the same paragraph they state they collect the password and that they don’t collect the password…).
but HOW Younify can get all my Netflix or Prime or whatever watched items and the like? if there are no API provided by Netflix/Prime/whatever, the only way to do so is by building a parser that is feed by the web version of such streaming service and look for the informations they need directly in the HTML (and everything else that they then could sell to third party, like stated in their privacy policies).
but if they’re parsing the “web version” of my Netflix account that means that they can do whatever I could do from the Netflix website, ain’t it? because by logging in, I’m giving a someone else “browser” the right to access my profile from www.netflix.com. and since is a “browser”, they could (not that they will, but they could) do anything I could do from my browser when logged in to www.netflix.com.
if the above is true, then hell could freeze before I gave someone else the right to access the browser version of my streaming services.
if the above is wrong and/or I am overthinking, point me where I’m wrong.
Privacy is important. we shouldn’t give access to anyone, even for a “simple” streaming services, without knowing all the bad outcomes.
I’m the same, my last sync was 4 Dec 2024 19:17 . - it is now 7 Dec 2024 10:54… Have definitely watched shows since the 4th.
Mine did the initial sync and then nothing further?
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This feature is great so thanks so much for all the work developing it.
Having said that I must say the sync every 24h is a bit too much and is the downside of such a great feature. Even more so when at this point is not even doing that every 24h. I am having the same issue as above comments where I have watched something on Apple TV+ for example and did not sync after 24h.
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I’m not a lawyer so take all of this with a grain of salt.
The privacy policy is for their actual product I haven’t used but may directly store passwords.
That isn’t the same thing as the SDK that is embedded in the Trakt app which as mentioned above, doesn’t transmit your username/password off device.
From some poking around (intercepting traffic to/from the Trakt app on my phone), I can confirm that my own Netflix password isn’t sent to Younify as claimed. Just a blob representing the session which yes, as well talk about below, is able to be used to access your account in order to retrieve watch history to be synced back to Trakt.
If I had to guess (without knowing their internals), I’d say that is almost certainly the case. Without an official API (which Netflix shutdown years ago), there isn’t any other way to power a service like this.
The exact implementation on Younify’s end is probably either a literal browser driven by automation on a server or a service emulating the calls made by a browser (without an actual browser involved). A common pattern is also to make the same requests as a mobile app (ie; the same queries as the Netflix mobile app) as they often have more structured data available.
Either way, if I had to guess, the token mentioned is likely a session cookie as the login happens via their standard browser page.
There was some discussion about scopes earlier but none of that will apply in this case. Scopes are part of a process called OAuth which won’t be at play here as these streaming services don’t have official APIs.
So with that, yes, technically speaking Younify could do anything with your account cookie but could is the keyword here.
They’re a company who Trakt will have some sort of agreement with, if not a legally enforceable contract.
Any reasonable company has policies in place not to mention there may be technical safeguards (ie; only certain employees can access user information) but I can’t speak to that with any knowledge here. Just standard stuff in software generally.
If a hypothetical rogue employee were to abuse credentials, it’d be no less of a crime and a breach of agreement on top of that I’m sure.
This part I do take issue with. The third parties in question are listed. They’re using Google Analytics and some other services to track technical information about their services. That isn’t the same thing as selling information.
I think you might be referring to this section?
We may also aggregate that usage data to sell to third parties. This information will only be shared in a way that doesn’t identify you. No personal information collected is ever disclosed or sold to third parties.
This is like saying as a shopkeep, I might inform a third party that 20 people visited my store and 5 of them bought milk. That isn’t the same thing as actually identifying those people or exposing personal information about them.
More broadly, there have been stories about companies such as Facebook selling user information in the past but that is almost always a misunderstanding.
One popular method is as above, selling aggregated information about behaviours but that isn’t the same as identifying information.
Another method (see: Twitter, Facebook etc) is to provide a platform for third party advertisers to run ads targeting users (non-specifically) by age/gender/interests and so on.
In this sense, a company is selling access to a userbase, that isn’t the same thing as selling information about the userbase.
To be clear, I don’t condone either of the above nor am I suggesting it has anything to do with Trakt or Younify, it’s just a tangent about a popular misconception
Anyway, I think you already have your answer from your previous posts about how it works.
The question here is really one of convenience versus trustworthiness. You get increased convenience but in exchange, you’re trusting a third party, who are trusted by Trakt (and presumably there’s some sort of formal agreement on top)
Personally, I’m probably just going to do manual scrobbling just for the increased specificity because I don’t think Netflix surfaces timestamps, only dates.
The pattern of screenscraping is pretty prevalent in industries where APIs aren’t common (like banks 
). It’s not ideal at all but unless companies create official APIs, there’s not really much of an alternative for accessing what is effectively your own data (although that’s a debate for another time)
I’ll caveat again. Just a normal Trakt user who is a software engineer as a day job, I’m not affiliated with Trakt or Younify so I don’t have any special insights.
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The general idea behind this feature is very promising and I certainly do hope that via improvements over time it’ll become something great.
But in its current shape, it’s rather annoying. The up to 24h delay isn’t helping. And to rate the seen content you must use the app or site anyway.
I assume that the covered streaming services will also heavily focus on the services available in the US, so the rest of us would end up with the big players getting synced and the others we’d have to log manually.
Let’s hope that it’ll end up being more than a patchwork rug.
Yes, without a proper API that’s indeed more likely than access/refresh tokens.
I hope they store it securely, because users might be more vulnerable to cookie hijacking (if Younify’s servers get hacked).
Nothing synced here either. The 24hr schedule doesn’t appear to be running
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Yip, I started over with Netflix, and now even the initial sync is not working. It seems this needs bug fixing.
Hello! Thanks so much for this - I’ve always wanted to be able to track independently what I’ve watched on streaming services to go along with what I’ve watched via Kodi.
I have Netflix and Prime loaded via the app and it shows they both synced, however they haven’t synced any data yet and it’s been a week. I am using Netflix Canada if that makes a difference, and I also set them both to sync existing data.
Any ideas?