11 ms·

The NYT privacy policy [0] is 5.2K words. It contains basically everything that they're criticizing Google for. And a bit more. Apparently NYT will by default s

• smnrchrds 7y ago
  There is a separation between NYT the corporation and the editorial staff. Just a couple of weeks ago, there was an article in NYT complaining about CCTVs installed in NYT office [0]. Should we now dismiss every article in NYT complaining about surveillance (especially workplace surveillance) as hypocritical and ironic, because if NYT thinks surveillance is bad, why do they do it themselves? Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions where workers enjoy a level of freedom from management in doing their work. The other example is tenured professors. We should celebrate this, not mock it. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/surveillance-cameras-work.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/01/opinion/surveillance-came...
  • icxa 7y ago
    > We should celebrate this, not mock it. I don't know what dystopian world you want to live in, but any time I see a company profit off sheer hypocrisy, I am going to call it out and mock it. They can have freedom all they want, but this article is generating clicks and revenues for Parent Corp, so they deserve the scrutiny. This isn't some public service they are providing.
    • SolaceQuantum 7y ago
      Asking for curiosity: Given the tenured faculty comparison, should we blame tenured faculty who criticize predatory lending when their university accepts students with the same predatory loans? Or perhaps a more direct comparison: Are tenured faculty at D1 sports universities hypocritical for researching the benefits of more funding going towards education and less towards massive stadiums?
      • akozak 7y ago
        Blame is the wrong word, but YES we should expect that they would hold their own employer accountable too.
      • icxa 7y ago
        I don't think there is a universal criteria for what constitutes whether an action is criticizable or not. I think more importantly is that the standards, whatever they may be, are applied uniformly, despite the circumstance and scenario. It isn't hard to imagine other scenarios which are seen as "lesser" where this wouldn't even be a question: of course you do, but for some reason we think that as an increase of import or salary, or whatever metric you may have in mind, all of a sudden some gray area is introduced. Stay true to your standards, and let it guide you. I wouldn't put up with this type of hypocrisy from my frozen yogurt shop, my clothing store, or coffee shop, so I shouldn't put up with it with my news organizations, schools and universities and politicians. The inputs to the situation might be different, but the output should be the same. Otherwise, we are being the hypocrite as well.
        • deleted 7y ago
          [deleted]
      • dantheman 7y ago
        Tenured faculty who are teaching students who can't afford their class are doing something wrong. They are advising students and should be advising them to switch to a more affordable college. It's a fundamental dereliction of duty if they don't.
        • whatshisface 7y ago
          "Welcome to PHY 4509, Classical Electromagnetism. You should not be here, this school is too expensive. If you would like to discuss transferring, you can find me in my office Tuesday and Thursday from 9 to 11AM. This message will repeat in thirty seconds."
        • bogwog 7y ago
    • unethical_ban 7y ago
      That sounds like the tired phrase from nationalists, "If you don't LOVE our country, you can LEAVE it!". People can both be in an organization and criticize its behavior.
      • majormajor 7y ago
        Yes, to say we should require otherwise is to embrace the status quo. Demanding that everybody hold their employer accountable for any breach is simply an unreachable standard, given the power distribution between employers and employees and the lack of sufficient "good" employers. So shifting the conversation to complaints about complaints (for not being sufficiently motivated to risk everything trying to burn the system down) is just distraction and helping the status quo even more.
      • stronglikedan 7y ago
        But apparently, in this case, they didn't. They criticized another company while staying mum on theirs.
        • colejohnson66 7y ago
          It’s akin to criticizing a different country while ignoring that your own does the same thing.
          • dahfizz 7y ago
            Don't you agree that what you describe is bad and should be pointed out and/or ridiculed?
            • colejohnson66 7y ago
              I do. That’s why I gave a more appropriate analogy
    • roywiggins 7y ago
      Would it be better if their journalists all just ignored the issue, or issued corporate-approved screeds about how whatever it is that their corporate owners are doing is just fine? Because to me both those options seem worse than hypocrisy. I'll grant you that diving into Google's TOS without mentioning their own is a bit tone-deaf.
      • inlined 7y ago
        Journalists disclose when they or their parent companies have any vested interest in the companies they cover. It seems like the article could have more journalistic integrity to note that Google isn’t the only one to follow the trend and their company does so as well.
    • lhorie 7y ago
      I'm not sure I like the alternative, where articles like this would not be allowed and companies' bad behavior would never get called out in the media. Because let's face it, that's the more likely non-hypocritical scenario than the one where corporations behave nicely.
      • repolfx 7y ago
        But you're assuming 4k word privacy policies are bad behaviour. The NYT is asserting this, but clearly doesn't believe it institutionally, so why should we accept this rather strange claim at face value? What's wrong with a privacy policy that has 4k words, especially for a service as complex and powerful as what Google provides?
        • lhorie 7y ago
          You don't have to accept anything at face value. The whole point is that you are able to consume different points of view and make up your own mind on the matter. This theme seems to come up a lot with different topics, not just privacy policies. Would it be better for NYT to NOT be hypocritical and just not report on accessibility if they don't implement it correctly themselves? Would it be better if it as a whole never verified sources given that their editorials are largely their own opinions? Personally, I'd take the "hypocrisy" because I understand that in large corps, typically the right hand doesn't talk to the left hand.
          • repolfx 7y ago
            Well .... yes? It'd be better for the NYT to not report on something that clearly is overblown and doesn't matter! Accusations of hypocrisy are useful because they act as a reality check. If 4k word privacy policies were so terrible the NYT wouldn't have one. Clearly nobody cares, so journalists should have taken this as a strong cue that they're chasing a non-story, almost certainly due to their own strong biases and desires. This isn't some evidence of heroic journalistic integrity, it's evidence they're spinning something out of nothing.
  • TimTheTinker 7y ago
    On the other hand, shouldn't management/leadership of journalism firms be held just as accountable for their actions as others? I think we're too quick to give a pass to business/leadership people for unethical behavior we rationalize to be good for business -- in education, journalism and anywhere else.
  • Cyph0n 7y ago
    > Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions where workers enjoy a level of freedom from management in doing their work. Eh, not really. They recently shuttered their daily political cartoon section, mainly due to a submission they published that was labelled as anti-Semitic.
    • 1wheel 7y ago
      They were syndicated political cartoons; not created by NYT employees.
      • Cyph0n 7y ago
        Ah, I somehow thought it was a mix of both. Thanks for the info.
  • njharman 7y ago
    > Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions by institutions I'll assume you mean journalistic ones. Cause employees of non-consumer facing corporations have far more freedom. The thing is, journalism, good journalism, and certainly public service journalism, no longer requires an institution. Don't believe in the lies that claim otherwise.
    • nkozyra 7y ago
      > The thing is, journalism, good journalism, and certainly public service journalism, no longer requires an institution. Good journalism is expensive, no current model sustainably funds that kind of work without advertising and infrastructure.
      • repolfx 7y ago
        That depends a lot on how you define "good journalism". Journalism is ultimately writing about what you see and investigating it to get the facts. Most stories are broken by just one journalist, big ones sometimes multiple. Journalists don't earn very much either. This isn't an expensive endeavour compared to many things even quite small companies routinely do, like build and run a TV advertising campaign. Moreover a lot of hard-hitting journalism appears to run on a shoestring. Look at Project Veritas. It's breaking a series of scoops about the internal behaviour of Valley firms, and it seems to basically be one or two people plus some cameras and a website.
        • nkozyra 7y ago
          I don't know how "shoestring" Project Veritas is, but it's not a particularly good source for unbiased information. Breaking a good, big story takes time and time takes money. Journalists don't earn a ton, but great journalists do pretty well. Their work and the merit of their work is considered worth paying for. The money has to come from somewhere. The best a good news organization can do is not allow the money to directly influence the journalism. At least in theory then the source of the money - within reason - is somewhat irrelevant. Historically, that's advertising or subscription. People got so used to free or nearly-free journalism in the late 1800s that even today people bristle at subscription, particularly for a non-physical product. So you have advertising.
  • tomcam 7y ago
    They are regarded as among the world’s best reporters. They can Google up their own privacy policy just like anyone else, no disturbance of the editorial/sales wall necessary.
  • btrettel 7y ago
    > Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions where workers enjoy a level of freedom from management in doing their work. The other example is tenured professors. PhD student here. I think the impression that tenured professors have freedom from management is an illusion at best. As far as I can tell, getting a PhD, getting hired as a professor, and getting tenure seem to filter out people who would challenge the system. It's easy for a university to say that their tenured faculty are free to do whatever they want if they select and cultivate people who won't take them up on that offer. (Now that I write this, I'm reminded of web hosting companies that offer unlimited storage or bandwidth but get irritated if you actually use a lot of storage or bandwidth.) Personally, I'm leaning towards the conclusions of the financial independence/early retirement community: real freedom comes when you have "FU money". Money is the unit of freedom in the US.
    • whymauri 7y ago
      I think the degree of disobedience from faculty varies between disciplines and schools. Professors in the humanities seem more inclined towards activism or iconoclasm than STEM. This isn't a dig at anyone, it's just that people who study social structures, interactions, and trends are seemingly more inclined to exert their ideological freedom(s). Meanwhile in STEM fields I think you're totally right: we keep our heads down and hyper-optimize for publishing research, leaving little space for rebellion or questioning of the academic status quo.
      • golergka 7y ago
        > Professors in the humanities seem more inclined towards activism or iconoclasm than STEM. But said activism is not usually any kind of disagreement with school administration though.
    • rjf72 7y ago
      I expect the same is also true of whatever freedom may exist for NYTimes writers. The site has taken a sharp and extremely homogeneous ideological slant in recent years on a wide array of different topics. This is ostensibly indicative of editorial manipulation, but it's also possible that instead they simply make sure to hire only journalists that already align with their biases and will, at the minimum, toe the line without needing to be told. Compare this with people such as e.g. Glenn Greenwald who seems to have achieved "FU money" and you actually see insightful and meaningful journalism [1] that isn't boxed into predictable ideological or partisan tropes. Of course he doesn't live in the US anymore either. Money isn't the unit of freedom in the US - it's the unit of freedom in the world. Not such a bad thing in many ways though. In times past your blood lineage was the unit of freedom. Money can be earned even from humble beginnings, but lineage cannot. [1] - https://theintercept.com/staff/glenn-greenwald/ https://theintercept.com/staff/glenn-greenwald/
  • catacombs 7y ago
    > Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions where workers enjoy a level of freedom from management in doing their work. That is not the case. Every every reporter has an editor he or she must report to. Sure, reporters are given some freedom on the stories they pursue, but it's hardly a hands-off approach.
    • procinct 7y ago
      I believe they are saying there is a separation between the editors and the rest of the Corp. The editors aren’t the ones coming up with the sites privacy policy.
      • nkozyra 7y ago
        Right; the idea is a separation of the profit-driven part of the organization from the editorial part. This is commonly known as "the wall."
        • catacombs 7y ago
          Got it. Thanks for the clarification.
  • Fnoord 7y ago
    > There is a separation between NYT the corporation and the editorial staff. Google is also a diverse company, with a lot of employees... What matters, in the end, is the policies.
    • rhacker 7y ago
      True, there come times where one person has to stand up and be counted.
  • rhizome 7y ago
    That essay is an opinion piece, not an article, and ironically for you the office surveillance was almost certainly installed by NYT corporate (or its designee), so the hypocrisy you raise cannot even exist according to the terms you provide unless you remove the separation between corp and editorial.
  • haberman 7y ago
    > Newspapers like NYT are one of the few institutions where workers enjoy a level of freedom from management in doing their work. Then why do these articles not also criticize the NYT for these practices? Google is an easy target for newspapers because they are competitors for traffic and ads. Show me NYT reporters calling out their own practices and I will believe they enjoy this level of freedom from management.
    • tedunangst 7y ago
      The google privacy policy affects more people than the NYT's?
• joelg 7y ago
  This class of argument is incredibly common (e.g. Pinboard criticizing the NYT piece on ad trackers for having ad trackers itself) and is incredibly counter-productive. It's the equivalent of smarmy relatives commenting "oh yeah? well you're still on it" if you complain about Facebook on Facebook. Sure, they're trapped inside the system, but they're trying to change it!! And that certainly deserves our respect. At least it deserves better than knee-jerk "gotchas".
  • SilasX 7y ago
    I disagree [1]; accusations of hypocrisy are making an important point, which is: "Hey, there's a reason people do the thing you criticize, as demonstrated by the fact that you do it. So instead of making this about shaming others for moral inadequacy, maybe you should be helping to identify and fix the systemic problem that leads everyone to do it. Since you have firsthand experience with that dynamic, why aren't you sharing your expertise here?" [1] Previous comment making the point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166369#20166980 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20166369#20166980
  • danShumway 7y ago
    It's not black-and-white. The hypocrisy of the NYT as an institution does not invalidate their points about Google. However, their points about Google do not make their own practices any better. It is also true that individual journalists and opinion authors don't get to decide how the NYT operates. However, they do get to choose what they write about -- and by broadly emphasizing Google's policies and by broadly ignoring the policies of institutions like the NYT, journalists risk rephrasing the cultural debate over privacy as "normal people vs big tech" rather than, "normal people vs big tech, the government, publishers, and the entire ad industry". Journalists do not have a responsibility to force their publishers to change, nor is it a problem for them to write articles that focus on Google. However, journalists do have a responsibility to research and understand the broader topics they are reporting on -- and it is not incorrect for readers to observe that we're seeing a trend of journalists who are remarkably hesitant to apply the same level of reporting scrutiny toward publishers and news organizations that they do towards other institutions. It's also not black-and-white whether this criticism is counter-productive. To the extent that it shelters companies like Google and plays into "whataboutism" -- yes, it's a problem. However, criticism of this nature is also the reason why NYT as a publisher has recently started to get more self-aware of their own practices[0]. If journalists see criticism of this nature and it makes them more likely to report on publisher privacy policies, that's productive. If institutions like the NYT get criticized and it leads to them internally examining and changing some of their own privacy policies, that's very productive. [0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-york-times-privacy.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-yo...
• vharuck 7y ago
  You can accept a group's idea without absolving the group of all sins. Judge news reports by their accuracy and relevancy.
• godelski 7y ago
  This is an opinion piece.
• scott_s 7y ago
  This is far more of an analysis than a critique, and it's just as much about the evolution of technology and the internet as it is about Google itself.
• danso 7y ago
  It's fair to make an opening critique of the NYT's privacy policy, based on word count, because that is the main metric the NYT uses for the visualizations in the article. But the article's claims don't rest on that metric, so to assert that the NYT has "basically everything that they're criticizing Google for" requires more evidence and specifics. Especially when we consider that the info Google solicits and stores is by every standard far greater than anything the NYT collects, which means that the potential damage from abuse is also far greater. So it's worth asking why you think Google having fewer words for its privacy policy is, even on a facile level, an argument for its favor and not against it, considering Google has far more kinds of data and ways to share it. But let's go with your claim, that NYT's policy is "basically everything" that they critique Google for. You mention NYT sharing name and postal address with advertisers and direct mailers – while that's something that has been an industry (in general, not just media) practice well before the computer age, let's agree for the sake of argument that it's still evil, and both the NYT and Google do it. What other privacy policies/potential abuses do you see them sharing? We might assert that both companies say they collect and store location information, but on closer reading of the NYT's policies, I see some specific and substantial differences: On ad-targeting: > The ads in our apps are not targeted to you based on your current GPS location, but they are targeted to you based on your ZIP code or device's IP address. On retention: > If you elect to have a location-based search saved to your history, we will store that information on our servers. If you do not enable the location-based service, or if an app does not have that feature, the app will not transmit to us, and we will not collect or store, location information. So I didn't scour the policy pages completely -- I tried to find info based on keywords, e.g. Ctrl-Fing for "location", "gps", "ip", so I apologize in advance if I overlooked something. But as far as I can tell, Google does not state a limit to the precision of location info they give to advertisers. And they do not say that users have the option to opt out of location-processing, nor do they state if it's possible for users to deny the transmitting of location info, period, in the way that the NYT says "we will not collect or store location information" if a user disables it. Again, I apologize if I've missed a similar specific statement in Google's policy. That's a key difference in scope of data collection and retention, one that strongly rebuts your generalization. But more to the point, it's a difference in scope that has extremely obvious differences in actual impact. I think it's safe to assume if the NYT were subpoenaed for a user's IP address (such as someone making illegal threats in the comments section) they would comply with authorities. But if the NYT were subpoenaed for the timestamped location info of a user accused of crime, and known to use the NYT website/app, the NYT, if it follows its stated policy, simply cannot comply, because it has made a decision to not track or store that info without user approval. That doesn't seem to be the case with Google. And the consequences to the user are not theoretical – Google has already acknowledged that it complies with sweeping requests made by law enforcement, such as "the coordinates of any phones that were in the area between 7:30 pm and 10:30 pm" on the night of a suspected arson fire [0]. You can argue all you want that Google is just following the law, but the fact remains that they choose to collect and store this info. And that being the case, claiming that the NYT's privacy problems are "basically everything" of Google's, seems so facile as to trivialize the debate. Disclosure: I just noticed that a former student of mine is listed as a co-author, and I'm assuming she was key in creating the data visualization and analysis. [0] https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/reverse-location-search-warrants-google-police.html https://slate.com/technology/2019/02/reverse-location-search...
• amelius 7y ago
  That's an ad hominem fallacy there. The argument still stands.
  • dTal 7y ago
    Specifically, it's a "tu quoque" argument ("you also"). Still, I don't think the purpose was to discredit the argument, as such - just to point out the hypocrisy.
• en-us 7y ago
  This is true of most news sites that report on things like this. I remember an article a few months back about the proliferation of Facebook trackers and how it is a bad thing. The article itself had a Facebook pixel tracker on it. The author could have discovered this doing the same they did for all the sites they reported on. Of course they did not cover their own site.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• haberman 7y ago
  "The First Law of @nytimes Tech Reporting: Whatever privacy practice they're complaining about, they do themselves." --https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1146492837447393282 https://twitter.com/antoniogm/status/1146492837447393282
• jrochkind1 7y ago
  I'm not sure that was a particularly _critical_ article, actually. It was pretty much just describing what Google does and how it's changed. I'm not sure there's a lot of value judgement in the writing, a lot of "critisizing Google." It was just reporting something of interest (it was of interest to me, was it to you?) But, sure, part of the motivation of writing it was presumably knowing that some/many people would find it dismaying or unfavorable to Google. Presumably the journalists who wrote it don't have a lot of control over the NYTimes privacy polices or practices. I'm glad the NYTimes paid someone to research it, and then published it, because then it got to me and I liked the article. I don't see any problems or surprises, this is the world. I guess they could write an article about the history of the NYTimes privacy policy... but really, who cares about reading that so much? Although sure, they could do more to use the nytimes as an example to be more transparent. That they didn't doesn't erase the value of the article. (The NYT OP does (now as I read it, it may not when you did) end with an italisized paragraph mentioning that the Times "collects data on visitors" too and linking to their own privacy policy and some other information)
• nickv 7y ago
  I think one of the frustrating things about this comment and the thread is this article is about Google's privacy policy specifically and how it reflects the change in Internet businesses. It's not a generic privacy policy article. The Times DID publish a generic privacy policy article a week ago and it did call itself out as one of the worst ones [1]. It wasn't an explicit "at the Times we do this", but there's an infographic/chart in the article that places the NYT in a pretty damning spot[2]. They also called out a rival news organization (the BBC) which does a great job relatively speaking. I think the Times has a huge point here in general and I find this article's narrative compelling and well done. Instead of making it about "why didn't we make this about themselves" I would rather focus on what it's trying to say. (Also, Google is probably the trailblazer here with this stuff and sets the tone/trend). [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/12/opinion/facebook-google-privacy-policies.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/12/opinion/faceb... [2] https://imgur.com/Ct3YHiU https://imgur.com/Ct3YHiU
  • masonic 7y ago
    it did call itself out as one of the worst ones And yet has not changed it in response.
    • nickv 7y ago
      I'm curious to see if there will be changes. You can't rewrite a privacy policy in 7 days. I actually appreciate that the journalists in the Times can call out other parts of the Times (this was a part of their Public Editor) but it doesn't mean that some journalist (or the entire newsroom) can change what the legal, ad or executive team think/do. And that's not a bad thing. Because if they could, it can go the other way too and that's really bad.
      • masonic 7y ago
        You can't rewrite a privacy policy in 7 days. It's been 13 months since it was last changed at all.