I noticed Plex recently added Ratings and Reviews to Movies & TV (link is to changelog). I immediately started using this to take notes about what I personally liked/disliked about past shows I watched.
I set the Visibility to Private assuming that only I could see these: however, when I wrote one of them, it said it couldn’t be published and was being sent to a moderation team for review?
It was published a few minutes later, but it made me wonder: who exactly can see these? Are my reviews that are set to Private being sent to some sort of review team or published in any way?
Yes, they are.
All reviews are subject to the Plex community guidelines. Even if you have set your own reviews to “private”.
This is done because at any arbitrary time – even much, much later – you could decide to make all your previous ratings and comments publicly accessible. (either to every Plex user, or just to your circle of Plex friends)
Because of that, every review is being screened by a moderation team before it is made available.
If I set a review to Private, I’m not expecting to share it. I would definitely expect it to be reviewed by a moderator team, but only later, if I actually do decide to make it public.
Is there any possibility for this change to be reconsidered? And if not, this should be very clearly indicated on the spot to enter a review, given that there is currently no documentation or help page that states this.
At which point you could have amassed dozens or even hundreds of reviews. And of course you’d expect for them to be vailable immediately, as soon as you change your sharing preference.
Do you see the predicament in there?
In which case it seems like a tradeoff between speed and user privacy… and of course I don’t speak for everyone using the feature, but I’d definitely prefer my private reviews to stay private at the expense of a longer review time were I to change the setting.
EDIT: Also, wouldn’t it take more time to review things that may never become public (extra work for the moderator team)?
Reviewing them only when you flip the switch would put a heavy load on the moderators. Plus you would be able to DOS the moderators by frequently flipping back between “private” and “public”. Which then would require yet another flag to store the information whether this version of the review has been screened before. Which would need to be made invalid if the user edits the review…
A can of worms. But I can see where you’re coming from with this.
Keep in mind that this is the first iteration of the user reviews. Maybe your suggestion is taken into account in a future release.
I will forward it to the right people.
Since you use it in this fashion, wouldn’t it be better if you used the “comment” feature instead? I mean that if you watch something, it becomes an activity, which you can put comments on. This would make more sense for notes as opposed to reviews, no?
Do note that I don’t know whether the comments are screened too or not. I doubt it though.
I don’t, really, no. Plex has 15 million users. The marginal burden of moderating a batch of reviews from a user that switches from private to public (a very rare use case) is going to be infinitesimal in size compared to the ongoing moderation burden of individual users on always-public settings writing new reviews. Moderation is hard, but that’s why it’s an extremely bad idea for smaller teams to get into user generated content. If Plex is at a scale that it’s confident it can do public-facing reviews safely and responsibly, then it can incorporate this guy’s user story.
I do not get the privacy outrage though, are you not at this stage already sharing a bunch of information to Plex about your viewing habits through sync in order to be able to provide reviews on plex’s pseudo social network? Someone correct me if I am wrong…
It’s more about what actually happens with the data.
Sure, we’re already sharing data with Plex - but according to their Privacy Policy, they store that data (and those of us with Plex Pass pay them to store that data) for use by us in their applications and services. If any employee could indeed go in, look up a user, and look at all our stored data, that would be a serious breach of their Privacy Policy. In several places on the docs they specifically say they can’t see what’s stored on our Media Servers (see heading What Data Gets Synced (i.e. Privacy)).
In the case of reviews, we’re setting a review to Private, aren’t told that it will be looked at by a team, and then it is reviewed by a moderation team, even though we’ve indicated we want it to remain Private.
This service is free and not tied to the Plex pass.
This information isn’t stored on the server, these are not fields populated on personal media, they’re posts made on plex’s social media network.
As with any social media network, profile access settings don’t absolve one from any level of moderation.
There will always be guidelines and moderation for any social network activity. Especially if it is free. I have said it time again, there should not be a great level of expectations for privacy if you’re using plex’s free online, discover and social media resources. This expectations ends where use of your personal media ends. All their support articles on these services will continually refer you to their privacy policy before you use them. They’re free because most times that is the cost.
I think that’s part of where the confusion lies. Yes, that’s true, but there’s 0 indication of that when making a review, especially since there’s also no button for Public yet.
When you make a review from the Mac client, it shows a modal that lets you enter text and set it to Private—that’s it. There’s no warning that it will be subject to moderation, posted on Plex’s social network, or (eventually) available for viewing by others.
Were that the case, then your logic would make sense, but since there’s not any warning of any sort then I don’t see how a user doesn’t have an expectation of privacy when they set something to Private.
I don’t know man, all i Know is plex already knows what you are watching because you consented and gave them access to that information, they just do not know where you watched it from, so that information is out there now, seems a bit arbitrary to now draw the line and say, now my reviews are private because I made them private to the rest of the network. The same can be said of your watching status, that can be set to private too, doesn’t mean plex cannot see it or do whatever with it with their 3rd parties. Read the privacy policy, there is a bold section called Who does Plex share Personal Data with?, read through it and conscientise yourselves on that. Ergo, my thought that oh, so this is where we draw the line? I am done folks
Well, that depends on the way this feature is implemented. A once “moderator-approved” review which had been left unchanged otherwise, would not be subject to approve it once more.
If reviews can be changed, are these changes reviewed by moderators again? If so, you can DOS them now already by adding and removing characters…
Or, writing a private review, delete it, write it again… you get the idea.
I agree with the user who’s complaining about somebody reading “private” reviews.
Even if the user has to agree to conditions in order to use that feature, it sounds wrong. And “private” being not really private because of possible work load of moderators, then these are the wrong priorities. Why not do it, then check if work load really is high, then find ways to not sink the feature instead of using terms like “private” which suggest intimacy and then have somebody read them all?
