| 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. |
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."