Buying the lifetime pass a few months ago was a clear mistake…already spent the past few days setting up an OSS alternative, time for a change.
Plex, we expected better from you.
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Has anyone else received another “week in review email?” I received my first one last Tuesday and expected one yesterday. I turned off all the sharing features (I think) and took down my server. But I still opted to see emails and wondered what they might look like now. I have users on my server who have accidentally enabled the sharing stuff and it’s too complicated to explain to them how to undo it. So I’ve kept the server off.
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Here’s a recent article from 2h ago. It explains the community anger and explains how you can update the settings as a user. Also worth noting, these same things were mentioned by a Plex employee above a few days ago (I wish it was pinned) explaining as well what settings need updated. I would suggest sending the article out to all your users so they can update things:
Here’s another article talking about the uproar from people. Plex’s response has been pretty luke warm to date.
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Got one yesterday
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Good. Plex need to understand just how invasive this little stunt was and how much it undermines user trust.
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Dude has been writing articles for Forbes pointing to where he wants to take this. He wants Plex to be a social media app.
The real value to the end user would be the aggregation of the content into one place that makes it easy to search, discover, play and even recommend content to your friends.
-Keith Valory, Plex CEO
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Oh my GOD! I read that article from the Plex CEO… that is… the exact 180 degree opposite of what I want from self hosted stuff. Like NOOOO
Plex is perfectly non social app stuff.
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I will do my best to provide actionable feedback here because I want to see this changed in a positive direction, and I imagine most people here do too. I have tons of experience with making seemingly small-on-your-end changes that result in big time reactions 
- Plain and simple, this is the kind of feature that people should have to look for and turn on completely willingly. It should not even have a popup that can be skipped through as most users do. The “social media” aspect should be a feature you have to seek out.
- Even still, privacy settings must default to PRIVATE. When it takes you to the specific screen where you can choose what is shared and to what degree, defaults should be private.
- The company needs an immediate all-hands meeting and needs to stop posting publicly because they’re making it worse. Admit your communication was bad (yes, it’s easy to blame users because it’s true most don’t read, but it is YOUR responsibility to make safe defaults for those that don’t read!).
- Implement the safe defaults immediately.
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Your sharing settings default to PRIVATE. If they’re not private, YOU CHANGED THEM.
However, it seems likely that many people were duped into changing them via Plex’s intentionally misleading Dark Pattern UI in this pop-up.
(As a side note… this entire outrage does worry me about people’s ability to avoid stuff like phishing scams…)
I never received, saw, nor clicked on that banner, yet my settings were changed.
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Honestly, it probably wouldn’t be nearly as bad if Plex hadn’t decided to send emails to all your friends showing your watch history. Yeah, they would still be able to see it, but would need to go into the website to do that (which most casual users probably aren’t going to do).
But just blatantly sending emails out saying “Here’s what your friends are watching!” is really really DUMB.
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That happens all the time
Phishing statistics show that in 2022, there were 300,497 phishing victims with a total loss of $52,089,159 in the U.S. alone.
Just Saying
To me, it reads as if when you hit “finish,” it is applying all those settings to what is currently displayed FROM private. I had the same defaults applied and all of that should default to PRIVATE when I hit finish and it should be completely brain dead simple.
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It probably would have helped if they didn’t auto change people you invited to share media with into friends. I never saw anything about approving that from happening.
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Respectfully this is BS. I’ve never changed or even looked at these settings and NONE of them were set to private
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I am very frustrated that this was done. this is personal information and should not be shared in this fashion. you have broken the trust of your users Plex!
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“Informed Consent”
Give this podcast a listen 404 media gets to the crux of the matter. They discuss the Plex fiasco in the second segment.
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Changing A to B would have stopped most of this trainwreck from the jump
Besides this…
I switched this all to “Unsubscribe from ALL” last week…AGAIN
YES, I clicked “Update Preferences” and even went back multiple times over several days to make sure it was still off, and it was
Until yesterday, I went to look and AGAIN it had those checked items reenabled
FYI, Unsubscribe from ALL, means ALL and should apply to anything you’d like to add to that page in the future behind my back
This is beginning to feel like I’m babysitting a couple of sneaky 4-year-old kids I have to watch like a hawk before they put the cat in the washing machine
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