Work in being done now to remove the related type of rows from the managed user accounts.
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Allow the feature to be disabled or just roll it back.
This is ridiculous.
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Massive privacy concern. Our searches are being transmitted to plex, inc now. My family will type something in not knowing it is not being sent just to me but also to a third party for their own benefit and collection!
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AFAIK this will be in an upcoming update.
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Hi elan,
Thanks for this upcoming update.
In association with this new search feature, can you please confirm whether or not our search terms are being sent to Plex?
@BigWheel since there are rules for online advertisement in the EU as well as in Germany, Austria, etc⊠I spoke to a lawyer earlier today.
As a result of this, you should make sure to properly mark any single result of a product of streaming services in user searches clearly as âavertisementâ (in the user language) to consent with federal German and EU law⊠At the moment, one of three different keywords must be used for ecery such search result.
Furthermore, Plex Inc needs to disclose certain details about those partnerships within the softwar product. I do not remenber all those details he listed, but it is clearly not enough to hide them on a web page unrelated to the PMS software product or hidden in âAGBsâ.
Third, advertising directed at minors must not contain a direct solicitation to purchase - for example, search results for family or children movies. Users not actively consenting to include advertisements in their search results for PMS libraries cannot be considered to know that kids or other minors get in contact with advertisements directly directed at them.
I did not initiate any action since it was only an informal talk to him. Please donât consider German / EU citizensâ rights as something that Plex Inc. as a company is free to ignore.
And please consider this message as a friendly reminder to take action to comply.
If you want an example of what that law means, just use a computer from within the EU and do a search with Google. You will notice that every advertisement that Google puts to the result page is properly marked as such. And it is very easy to find thier disclosures on advertising, their partnerships, etcâŠ
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Thanks for this information rossinior.
Great.
What Iâd love to know is, why was a beta rolled out to everyone, with some breaking changes (glad to see inappropriate content is no longer being shown on my kids account!) with features so clearly missing, like if you donât select services not showing that content?
Edited - itâs clearly beta because of the clearly untested issues with watch more showing r rated trailers on a kids account. Thatâs why I want to know how this got approval for being pushed to everyone without testing.
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@rossinior I will pass that along but I am not a lawyer and am not going to get into a legal discussion
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Thatâs fair. I would not be able to do much more than pass the info that I got to you guys.
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I did understand. Dude couldnât figure out how to get past the initial screen.
what this adds to the search results is pretty ignorable in my opinion. It does show at the bottom of the list after all.
With all due respect to rossiniorâs attorney friend, I think that heâs over-reading the regs a bit.
German law is outside my scope but I am an attorney and Iâve dealt with EU ad regs many a time. I think that Plex is actually covered under the existing system because theyâre clearly labeling search result with headings like âMore Way to Watchâ and indicating that the links to the streaming services are buy/rent/subscribe options. My understanding is that you have to be doing something deceptive to run afoul of the existing EU ad-marking reg and I donât see that here.
Same holds true for the advertising to children bit. The advertiser has to take some sort of affirmative action to target children. Just placing ads where kids might see them doesnât count.
Again, it may be different under German law (which tends to have all sorts of very specific provisions that only German lawyers can keep track of).
All that said, Plex may be running afoul of the new EU Digital Services Act and this might be what rossiniorâs attorney was referring to. However, that act is still in committee and itâs going to be months to years before itâs passed by the full EU Parliament and comes into force. Until that happens Iâm kinda scratching my head over what EU regs Plex might be breaking here.
I wish it werenât so, but I canât see any good legal reason why Plex canât do what itâs trying to do under the EU rules.
In actuality you are violating the guidelines. I have copied them for you since it seems you havenât actually read them.
â* Responding to a postâs tone instead of its actual contentâ
" Be agreeable, even when you disagree
You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. Thatâs fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid :
- Name-calling
- Personal attacks of users, employees, or Plex
- Responding to a postâs tone instead of its actual content
- Knee-jerk contradiction
- Ranting
- Trolling
- ALL CAPS
Instead, provide reasoned counter-arguments that improve the conversation."
Lol. Where are they supposed to throw a tantrum? How should he express his extreme displeasure at the behavior of plex? There is no profanity, he doesnât call anyone names or demean anyone⊠So what do you have an issue with? The word âinsultingâ and the phrase âgarbage force fed to usâ?
âItâs perfectly ok to disagreeâ as long as they do it the way you approve of?..
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Your tone is absolutely awful. You should remove this comment, itâs completely inappropriate and against the very guidelines youâre linking.
Well, dunno⊠havenât questioned his advice on this⊠and I will not start a discussion about this or that law. That would be a stupid act on my side since I simply donât have much expertise in that field.
Sorry for referencing German language URLs ⊠one is referring to âunlautere Werbung an Kinder gerchtetâ (and I was told that advertisments disguised as search results in a local search that a child does for children movies (for example) probably qualifies as such):
The other is a quicksearch result and an Austrian text about advertisements being properly labelled as such in all kind of media: which has the keywords named as labels for advertisements:
https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/GeltendeFassung.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnormen&Gesetzesnummer=10000719
The third is a report about EU law about harsher rules for online video services for minors from 2018 which mentions easy ways of flagging inappropriate content (which is not existant in Plex and the minor must be considered to be unaware of the search result being content inapropriate for minors) and which states the EU countries had 21 months to make it become national law.
These links are not from the lawyer I talked to, but results from a very brief search of mine. Once I talk to him, Iâll probably ask him for more details. Sorry that I cannot refer to exact laws and paragraphs. It is hard enough for me to even find suitable phrases in a foreign language⊠
That being said, I welcome Elanâs and BigWheels announcements of that new feature gets a little less âbeing pushed down our throatsâ feeling with an upcoming update.
The only way to avoid this on Nvidia shield is not to âupgradeâ the client
I have the last good version of plex stored. 8.27 I think. Avoid the 9.02 client
Plex, by forcing this major change (private server to commercial streaming )
You really disappointed me, force feeding a beta on us adds insult to injury
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Or emby. But yeah ⊠I use plex so I dont have to use a streaming service. Isnt that what it was made for? Emby isnt as polished but it gives you most of the functionality and you can choose to register a user name with their server or just connect to your stuff directly. The transcoding is insanely fast in Emby.
Their should be 2 versions of Plex. The grandma version and the power user version. Or maybe an advanced advanced tab/button hehe.
Cheers,
I agree!
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Thank you, this is excellent news and a relieving decision.
Would you be comfortable detailing whether it will be simply a toggle, or rather in the sense of âonly returning results from linked platformsâ (no linked platforms would just avoid all cascading behaviour)?
I certainly bias towards local media, but Iâm anywhere from a consistent to seasonal subscriber to other platforms, and would love to use Plex as a hub!
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Plex, please allow us to turn this feature off.
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