Yesterday, a message popped up in my Plex app on my Android phone asking for consent to sell my user data. I declined. After that, I lost access to all my libraries on both the Android app and the Windows PC app. I checked my Plex server on my Synology in the same network. It’s running fine.
I suspected this might have been caused by opting out, so I went to the Plex Windows app and navigated to Account Settings → Privacy → Privacy Preferences and ticked the box to agree to the sale of personal data (https://www.plex.tv/vendors-us/). Unfortunately, this did not resolve the issue.
Apologies if this has been discussed before — I searched the forum using terms like data sell consent but couldn’t find any relevant threads.
I do not believe that opting out of selling your data will shut off access. Pretty much anyone here on the forums has opted out of it and has no problems accessing their server.
Most likely what happened is that when you open ANY client, before you can access your own server it asks for your consent on data collection. After you confirm a choice one way or another, it then allowed the client to try to access the server, but the server was inaccessible.
Otto suggests various options for fixing your server/clients, which is most likely the best options to try right now. If the suggestions do not work, we can attempt to troubleshoot further, such as determining if it is a network access issue (are you in the same house?), a network subnet issue (is your NAS behind a different router?), or something else.
I restarted my server. It fixed the issue. Now I can see my libraries in Plex. I will experiment the privacy settings a bit and see if it affects my server access.
Thanks again for both of you for taking an interest in my query and providing guidance!
I have opted out for selling my personal data and selected all NO to Features, Purposes, Special Purposes, TCF Vendors and Non-TCF Vendors about 2 weeks ago. It worked fine until yesterday when I add new media to the server and found no meta data was fetched for these new media. I suspect these "no"s cut off my connection but not sure why only happened now. I don’t want to select all YES.
Is there a way I can restore my privacy settings to the default?
I don’t think that’s related. You should be able to see why those metadata requests fail when looking into your server logs. Sounds more like a networking issue, e.g. a bad DNS configuration or other form of restriction, preventing Plex from connecting to the metadata source.
