[rosterface]

The New York Times is as bad at privacy as anyone. Here is their policy:

https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014892108-Priv...

They make extremely illegitimate claims about "needing" to collect your personal information to provide their "services". Which is absolutely untrue since they're a newspaper you could read completely anonymously with zero degradation to experience (except where they've deliberately hobbled that option).

[tzs]

> The New York Times is as bad at privacy as anyone

...and its dot in the charts in the article reflects that. Go diagonally up to the right from the Facebook dot until you are just about to leave the "college" reading level region, and you'll find the dot for the Times.

[toby-]

Do you suppose the author of this opinion piece wrote the New York Times' privacy policy?

Edit: some fair counterpoints to me, below. But publishing an opinion piece does not necessarily imply endorsement, and nor does it diminish the author's point(s) one iota.

[arkades]

I keep hearing this. Every time the NYT writes an article on X, while being a hypocrite on X, "Do you think the guy who wrote this was also in charge of X at the NYT?"

It's a valid counterpoint. The guy who wrote about X is not, usually, in charge of X. Agreed. The criticism, however, is not about the author - it's about the organization that endorses both the action X, and the criticism of X.

The NYT is an opinionated organization, not a public wall open to whoever wants to throw things at it. They have an editorial stance. When they write criticisms of X, they are implicitly - as an organization - criticizing X. When they do X themselves, they are - as an organization - implicitly endorsing X. When they wish to distance themselves from a criticism in an article, they explicitly point out - hey, this is an Op-Ed from such-and-such author, and doesn't represent the views of the NYT. When it's not an Op-Ed, and/or when it's not disavowed, they are saying: this article represents the views of the NYT.

The writer is not a hypocrite. The organization, however, is.

There's nothing illogical or invalid about holding the organization accountable for doing bad things, and for pointing out that the organization is trying to earn goodwill from the public by being "against X" while perpetrating the act themselves.

[antientropic]

The linked article is in the Opinion section, so no, it does not necessarily reflect the stance of the NYT and accusations of hypocrisy are therefore unfounded in this case.

[inscionent]

> The writer is not a hypocrite. The organization, however, is.

This is not how how a functioning news room works. That's not how any of this works. You don't check your individuality at the door. A good publication can and should promote well reasoned work, especially if it conflicts with the status quo or view points of other writes in the org.

[AstralStorm]

Can and should, yet so didn't and still acts contrary? Sounds almost exactly like hypocrisy to me.

[deogeo]

Even assuming the New York Times or the author are hypocrites, that does not diminish their point.

I follow the news to get informed, not to measure the moral virtue of the media (except as it relates to the accuracy and representativeness of their reporting).

[patrickmcnamara]

> It's a valid counterpoint.

It's not at all. It is a valid attack on the NYT, but it's not a counterpoint. I.e. ad hominem.

[SilasX]

It's not relevant.

I think accusations of hypocrisy usually map to an insightful argument: "Hey, there's a reason people do that thing you object to, and it's usually a good reason, as demonstrated by the fact that, given all the options, you find yourself resorting to it. So, maybe instead of shaming people, you should be helping to isolate the reason and find a way to obviate it instead of just throwing stones."

[nickv]

To be fair, the New York Times' privacy policy actually is represented as one of those dots in the image (and it's not in a particularly good spot ... it's pretty close to the top):

https://imgur.com/a/wTHkk4O

[rosterface]

I think this piece is about making people aware of privacy and pointing out that the platform you’re reading it on is one of the worst offenders is worth doing. As another commenter pointed out that the New York Times policy contains the entire Google privacy policy within it:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166947

[danShumway]

This is such a bad argument.

I don't suppose the author of this opinion piece wrote or controls any of the privacy policies they reported on. But they chose which privacy policies they were going to report on, and which ones they were willing to highlight in their article. Is it really an unreasonable ask of a reporter who is focused on privacy to also be willing to research the practices of the website that hosts them?

To be fair, of all the news organizations I have beefs with on privacy, the NYT has been doing a lot better in their reporting than their competition:

- They have a disclaimer at the bottom of this article linking to their own policy. They also include several news organizations (including themselves) in this dataset.

- Reporters have been willing to publish articles that talk about and link to (good) ad blockers like Ublock Origin, and acknowledge that they're an effective way to increase privacy.

- Their editorial staff has been (relatively) self aware about the NYT's privacy practices and appears to be talking about it internally.

Could they be better? Yes. Is it a weird omission that in an article that specifically calls out Google, the reporter doesn't mention that the current NYT privacy policy is both more complicated and longer than Google's current version? Yes. But comparatively, if I was going to call out any set of reporters on this, I wouldn't start with anyone working for the NYT. I think they're moving in the right direction here. This is a well written article.

In general though, it's not unreasonable to call out reporters for failing to look at or refusing to talk about the privacy policies of their employers in their articles. I don't expect them to force their tech teams to change things, I don't expect them to walk away from their jobs, and I don't expect them to lobby their bosses on my behalf. I just expect them not to ignore important, relevant parts of the stories they report on -- because shifts in privacy regulation are going to have huge impacts on things like news funding, and we need to talk about that.

[toby-]

> Is it really an unreasonable ask of a reporter who is focused on privacy to also be willing to research the practices of the website that hosts them?

While not mentioned in the article's text, the New York Times does feature as a data point: https://i.imgur.com/uaOqPod.png

And the article ends with the NYT's own message: "Like other media companies, The Times collects data on its visitors when they read stories like this one. For more detail please see our privacy policy and our publisher's description of The Times's practices and continued steps to increase transparency and protections."

[danShumway]

Yep, I mention that - of the reporters/organizations that need to be called out on this, the NYT is low on my list.

In general though, I disagree that reporters lacking control over the platforms they use means that they're immune from this type of criticism. News organizations are a part of this conversation whether they like it or not, and there are no resolutions (legal or technical) that won't affect news sites. It's irresponsible for a reporter to ignore that.

When people call out the hypocrisy in articles like this, they're not blaming the reporter for their employer's data policies, they're blaming them for ignoring that those data policies exist.

It doesn't mean the reporter's points aren't valid, it does mean there's a dimension of the story they're ignoring, either through ignorance or through choice.

[wutbrodo]

This wasn't published on Kevinlitmannavarro.com, and it's not his name on the big top-of-the-page header: it's an opinion column written by him but published by the New York Times under their banner. It's a pretty basic expectation for journalistic entities to address potential conflicts or hypocrisy. It's not a requirement, but is a reasonable complaint, and dismissals like asking if the opinion author wrote the privacy policy are beyond nonsensical.

Apart from that, addressing seeming hypocrisies in things that newspapers complain about but engage in is often illuminating: I recall an Atlantic(?) article complaining about deceptive ads that went out of their way to talk about their own likely serving of deceptive ads, describing the difficulty in knowing which ads you'll be serving given the byzantine web of sellers, resellers, exchanges, etc etc that Web publishers deal with.

[smacktoward]

They're a newspaper that charges customers to read it, which means they need to limit access to their services for people who haven't paid. Which means they need a way to distinguish paying users from non-paying ones. Which means that they have to have some idea who you are when you access their services, so they can tell which services you should have access to and which you shouldn't.

It's funny, you never see anyone arguing that Netflix is under some kind of obligation to let everyone watch their programming anonymously for free.

[SomeOldThrow]

And yet, this language is used to collect ad information on paid subscribers. So it’s 100% bullshit still.

[smacktoward]

When did they ever claim to you that subscribing meant you wouldn't see ads anymore?

You know that if you subscribe to the print version it has ads in it too, right?

[SomeOldThrow]

When they claimed it was necessary to support the service. It’s absolutely not. Newspaper ads are not targeted.

Anyway ads in any form still produce perverse incentives for a supposedly journalistic entity—I don’t know how anyone can read a newspaper that takes ad money and consider it unbiased.

[Endy]

>It's funny, you never see anyone arguing that Netflix is under some kind of obligation to let everyone watch their programming anonymously for free.

That's because we don't bother talking about it, it just gets done. Why waste time on a trivial situation? Instead, talk about the NYT which is an important cultural institution. Plus I can read a free copy at my local library, or at NYPL, anonymously.

[derefr]

> Plus I can read a free copy at my local library, or at NYPL, anonymously.

Now that would be an innovation: libraries providing access to commercial streaming-media services, through your library membership. Much like they provide access to scientific-journal subscriptions, or e-book services.

With the proliferation of different streaming services, it almost seems like an inevitability.

[SomeOldThrow]

To my understanding this is already available at many public libraries.

[Endy]

Audiobook streaming has become a standard service of local libraries.

[Scoundreller]

Or through their tor service.

[arkades]

Netflix never put all their content out on the internet to be accessed anonymously for free.

It's almost as if the news media created this expectation in their industry.

[autoexec]

> Collection of personal information is necessary to delivering you the NYT Services or to enhance your customer experience.

I'll grant them delivery in some cases. They have to collect IP addresses, some browser details, info from HTTP headers etc. but they don't have to keep any of it for any longer than it takes to serve pages (although there are good and sane reasons for keeping some of that stuff for a while at least). What kills me every time is "enhance your customer experience" which I assume means present you with ads, track your usage to help us increase the number of clicks/page views/ad impressions, and sell your data to our "partners" who will spam/advertise to you relentlessly.

[csomar]

New York Times also abuses advertising, paywalls and page size. But the fact that they write about issues should signal that they still have some journalism integrity.

[ranie93]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

[dsr_]

No, that's not what that means. An ad hominem attack is invalid because the target is simply being insulted or called evil in some way. "You can't believe Bill Smith: all the Smiths are no-good iron-pounding dummkopfs."

If the NYT calls other organizations out on their privacy policies without pointing out that their own is terrible, the term for that is a hypocritical omission.