
How The New York Times Thinks About Privacy - tysone
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/10/opinion/sulzberger-new-york-times-privacy.html
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musicale
"Countless companies are wrestling with these trade-offs, many of them doing
the best they can within a digital ecosystem they can’t hope to unilaterally
reform. The internet doesn’t have to be this way. But change needs to be
driven at a societal level — by politicians, leaders of major technology
companies and the public at large."

That sounds like an excuse for making it "someone else's problem" when the NYT
itself could actually take a stance for privacy by switching to self-hosted
ads without tracking and removing any other trackers (such as social media
integration buttons) from the site.

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AnimalMuppet
I wonder, though, what fraction of the value of the ad is in the tracking?
That is, if the NYT did what you said, would the rate they could charge for
ads go down? Do advertisers (or somebody else) pay extra for the tracking
info?

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shard972
> 24 requests blocked

Tell me when they are doing something about privacy and not just thinking
about it and writing op-eds about how they are the leader of the pack about
writing about privacy.

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hkhanna
I'm not sure what this comment adds. Mr. Sulzberger precisely calls out this
fact out:

> The averaged results show how ubiquitous this practice is: The Financial
> Times had 19 trackers, The New York Times had 24, The Wall Street Journal
> had 53, The Guardian had 54, The Washington Post had 58, Fox News had 63,
> BuzzFeed had 67, HuffPost had 77, CNN had 83, Vox had 95, and USA Today had
> 100.

And he addresses the hypocrisy of the situation:

> As with a politician railing against high drug prices while accepting
> campaign donations from big pharma, a news organization cannot talk about
> privacy on the internet without skeptical readers immediately, and rightly,
> examining its own practices for signs of hypocrisy.

To be sure, an attempt to improve privacy practices by a business that relies
on digital ad revenue should be met with a healthy dose of skepticism. But
dismissing the project for lack of privacy purity seems counterproductive.

Let's not let perfect be the enemy of the good. I'm very happy to see the an
organization like The Times calling attention to the problems of privacy
online. They're not perfect, but steps like these should be encouraged.

