I recognize that plex employees/mods are being intentionally obtuse in calling this “opt-in” because this feature might generate some $$$.
But putting that aside, lets actually think about how a user in going to process this series of screens:
- User opens Plex with the intention of watching something, they are greeted with the first screen.
Maybe they’re interested, more likely they’re not, they just want to watch their show and so they click through the first screen
- Hit with second and third screens, click through them
- They arrive at the actually important modal. The options are set to Friends by default.
The most likely thing is that the user clicks through this without reading. However, if they actually do stop and parse the options, it’s even more confusing.
Users are familiar with the concept of Friends. It’s on every social media site. Making someone your friend is also 100% of the time a process that the user initiates, MANUALLY. Only, in this case, Plex has added everyone you share a server with as your Friend, without asking or notifying you! Putting aside the fact that the Friend concept seems pretty new to Plex, especially with how it’s being used here, users are going to have a false expectation that they do not have any Plex friends.
The average user that stops to read this modal is going to assume that with no friends, nothing will be sent or shared with anyone. They’re going to click through, and would be shocked to know that I’m now receiving a copy of their watch history. They wouldn’t even know that we are Friends.
Never mind the fact that even if they knew, they would need to click into 4 separate drop-downs to manually select “private” before watching their show.
What a ridiculous failure of UX. The default option needs to be changed to Private, and a patch applied for every account that defaulted to Friends which changes their settings to Private.
Better yet, delete this useless feature.
EDIT: Also, this is 10000% a GDPR violation. It cannot be informed consent if the user has no concept of what “Friends” are, or who that group is made of.
