be interesting to see if Lon.TV (the biggest plex fanboy and shill IMO) will make a YT video about this? he seems to go out his way to promote plex, so his silence will speak volumes if that’s the route he goes down.
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Thoughts from a decade-user…
- So it appears that simple fixes/adjustments/enhancements are being set aside for this crap?? That explains so much…
- I don’t blame the smugness of ‘you know who’. Instead, I wonder about the developers - ALL OF THEM. Are they sounding the warning bells when something with this much potential political harm is being rolled out? Fire everyone who’s response is “Not my problem, I’m doing what I was told.” Minimum response should be to warn management of your concerns.
- Fire your PR ‘expert’ (regardless who that person is).
- I really don’t care what you do with this privacy-invading ‘feature’ as long as you don’t force me into it -which you did. I actually get why some might like it… Benefits must be compared to the pitfalls. OOPSIE!
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Here’s the thing – I love Plex.
But to be completely honest, I also worry that this boneheaded move may kill the product completely.
The most reasonable move, at this point, would be to reset EVERYONE’S privacy status to PRIVATE. Then, if they really want to continue promoting this whole social network thing, they should re-do the whole pop-up ordeal, minus the Dark Pattern design that tricks the lazy & uninformed into just clicking “Finish” on a pop-up and sharing everything with Friends.
However, even with this strategy, the damage is already done. They already might risk getting sued out of existence with how they handled this whole thing upfront. And that makes me sad.
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They won’t. I’d suspect that, at worst, they might get a bit of a ticking off by a GDPR authority with advice/demand to change some practices/wording etc., but that’ll be it.
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GDPR fines (if applicable) can be quite high.
“up to” 20 million euros or 4% of global turnover from the previous year, whichever is higher.
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They could be up to 100 billion bazillion trillion euros and it still wouldn’t make a difference. IF complaints get made and IF those complaints end up in a fine (which is a big IF) the chances of it being sizeable enough to impact the ability of Plex to do business is negligible.
It’s far more likely that Plex will answer any complaints with an explanation that they got legal advice and believed they were in compliance, GDPR regulators may disagree, and then they’ll be a requirement to alter practices.
I may be totally mistaken, but I don’t get the impression that Plex is a massively profitable company with a bottomless war-chest of money.
They’re also based in California, where nearly everything is illegal (by US standards). One would think they did the research on whether this would fly. But I’m super-not-a-lawyer.
This is about Privacy.
Where is the Privacy Settings (as a separate tab) in Settings? 
There is Security, under Account, but that only has Password and 2FA.
Scroll all the way down Account, and we finally find Privacy, but that does not link to this issue.
So, its not even buried in server Settings, it buried in a plex.tv as " Discover Emails"
I’m sure a lot of though at PLEX went into how to add this “feature”
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While Plex can state all these things about what will be shared and how it should work, there will always be the possibility of bugs in the system.
So if you do use it, you are trusting that the solution is (and will remain) bug free. (Which I have to say having used Plex for years is probably unlikely.) Why should this Discover/Friends/Sharing stuff be bug free when a lot of the other stuff is not.
And as for Adult content, you are also trusting that Plex have managed to correctly tag all adult titles and continue to do so on an ongoing basis, so as not to be included.
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yes it is “ifs”, but considering they only recently got more investment of 50 million dollars (i assume to keep them running), a 20 million euros fine would be considerable for any company.
ignorance and “Believing we did correct” is, quite rightly, no excuse and cuts no mustard with GPDR.
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You’re missing the point I’m making. Talking about how big a fine COULD be given out under GDPR is meaningless. It’s not ever going to happen.
On the other hand, taking legal advice on what you should do and believing you’re in compliance based on that is an excuse and does cut mustard.
Believe it or not, breaches of GDPR happen all the time across a huge number of organisations, very few of them ever end up in a fine. The regulators are far more interested in ensuring that whatever mistakes that occurred are corrected and (where appropriate) practices are changed to ensure similar doesn’t happen again in the future.
that’s why i said “if”, try reading slower to make sure you understand what is being posted.
at no point did i say a fine WAS applicable, i said “if” applicable.
You’re still missing the point. It’s not about whether a fine is applicable or not, nor have I taken your posts as saying that a fine is applicable. It’s about that even if a fine is applicable it will never ever ever ever ever ever be anywhere near a value that would impact Plex’s ability to do business. So talking about a fine could be up to a certain figure (if applicable) is meaningless. It doesn’t matter what that figure is or could be.
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you’re guessing though.
you have no idea what any fine could be (we know what the limits are), AND you don’t know what the businesses finances are like.
you can offer an opinion, you cannot offer it as fact.
List of fines:
Well thanks for proving my point. Not one of those fines (while looking huge on the face of it) are significant when you compare to the amount of money made by the respective business. Looking at just the biggest two fines: for Meta (Facebook) it’s less than 1% of it’s annual turnover. and for Google it was 0.04% of their annual turnover in 2018. The picture is pretty much the same as you go down the list.
I did not want to prove anything … just keep all of you informed.
And you also proved nothing since taking out the biggest moneymakers and generalizing from there is bad statistical evidence - your method is flawed.
Other than that, I don’t care about fines, the prbability of fining or the outcome for Plex. They are making money from those data sharing features, so they have to follow rules. Have to a.k.a. HAVE TO or risk daamaging the trust that users may have, maybe also their own business model if a governance entity looks more closely on the details of it and the rules that get bend or broken by the methods to live that business model.
What do folks think about Tautulli?
It’s self hosted collecting your plex users history & stats but doesn’t send out emails but otherwise it’s similar?
