Asking here for a Plex employee to respond. What is the purpose of the “All No “option at the top of the vendors opt out page? There are several other sections below that allow you to choose “All No” as well that randomly get toggled to either blank or “yes”, when new vendors are added. If the “All No” at the top of the screen is selected, as in my image, does that mean the other settings on the page do not matter?
Can you also provide clarification to why the settings are not permanent and are changed when new vendors are added?
I am not an employee, but I figure this is a lazy implementation of a method to allow a user to QUICKLY check “No” on every radio box on the page for that section. It is not a universal setting that forces a default setting for everything within that category, simply a shortcut to help you see whether you have all “No’s” or not.
It could be a malicious implementation to allow them to sell everyone’s info (temporarily) to new vendors, or it could be laziness/incompetence/unwillingness to implement a permanent opt-out setting going forward. I’m leaning towards the latter option.
FWIW, I do opt out of all of this, and check this menu irregularly.
The “All No” at the top reads that regardless of the below settings, we are opting out ”of sharing personal information with any Vendor for each specific purpose or feature”. However, that seems to not be the case when new vendors are added. Is this just a flaw in t website? And data really isn’t being shared? What data is actually being shared regardless of that thing being set. I’m specifically asking what that universal “All No” setting actually means if the below settings are randomly getting toggled on when new vendors are added. This should be a VERY easy question for the Plex team to answer. We’ve had years of speculation on this with no definitive answer. It’s time to get an answer.
I know that. You know that. This is more so for the optics of the situation. There’s so much speculation around this that is finally time the question gets asked in multiple forms. I’ve posted here, on Reddit, and emailed support. If we don’t ever get a definitive answer, we know our answer. Or we could all be pleasantly surprised.
Shockingly, I did get a response back from my support email:
Hello <user redacted>,
Sorry you've had trouble. What you describe is already being investigated by our back end team. There does appear to be an issue where new vendors that are added do not always correctly inherit a global or section choice that has been made. The team is already working to resolve that. Apologies for any inconvenience.
Thanks for using Plex!
I responded back and requested clarification on the “All No” button at the top that states: Click “All No” if you want to opt-out of sharing personal information with any Vendor for each specific purpose or feature
In practice, the toggles in the header/top are really just shortcuts to change the state of the individual vendors below it. So, if you want all vendors to be "no", then you should ensure that all of them are individually in the "no" state.
I think we have our answer on that. They do… nothing.
That’s such a BS answer! That means that Plex should be REQUIRED to send a notification whenever a new vendor is added to the list! Just another nail in the coffin for my decision to move to greener pastures.
No matter how many times I/we visit this page and select “All No”, there’s almost always some marked “Yes” without ever making any changes and NEVER receiving any notifications of our previously set privacy settings.
I consent to Plex to: (i) sell certain personal information (hashed emails, advertising identifiers) to third-parties for advertising and marketing purposes; and (ii) store and/or access certain personal information (advertising identifiers, IP address, content being watched) on my device(s) and share that information with Plex's 291 advertising partners, who are listed at www.plex.tv/vendors.
At this point the only good answer is one where they very specifically explain what is going on. What data they sell by default, and moving forward how to assure us that they won’t sell data after we’ve opted out.
Anything less including silence says everything we need to know.
I’m expecting complete silence. And that the toggle does nothing. I mean it defaults us in to sell our data. We can’t put that back in the bottle. It’s already been packaged off and given to a third party vendor to do whatever they want. Plex already got paid for our data.
We opt out now after they sold the data and what, they won’t sell our data to that vendor a second time? Great! They’ll just find more to sell to before we can opt out again.
Plex clearly needs the money. After the price hikes, forcing ad supported content in our face on Roku, and now they need to sell our data too. You’d think they were going bankrupt and insolvent because of how desperate they are for every cent.
Well, one keeps hoping that Plex would see the fault in their ways and hope they come back to some sort of common sense…but alas, everything appears to fall on deaf ears…
