I feel like PG's submarine piece has really made HN's view of PR very black and white. There are a lot more gradations, and likely this is a piece that was pitched by Facebook and actually was moderately investigated by Wired. The worst journalists are copy pasting press releases, the best are finding their own stories, but the vast majority lie somewhere in between. And I'm not convinced there is anything wrong with that.
Criticism? The EFF comments were practically praising Facebook:
From the outside, says Adi Kamdar, an activist with the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, it seems Facebook is “doing a good job” anonymizing personal
info as it seeks to link online and offline behavior. Facebook is adamant
that its system can’t be cracked—i.e. can’t be used to match names from
Facebook accounts with behavior off of Facebook—and Kamdar says he has no
reason to believe otherwise.
How would the article have to have been written for you to not think it was a press release?