An editorial is not intended to produce new content, e.g. report on new news, only to state opinions about the known state of an issue. To that end, this article cites a great deal of highly detailed content to which it links towards in making its argument. I had no idea there was a newly reported data breach just on wednesday this week, for example. I'm also certain that tens of thousands of people will first learn of FB's new dating initiative via this editorial, and in that regard it is valuable that the NYT will put a much needed cautionary spin on this information. Too many people still have no regard for the harm they do to not just themselves but all of their social contacts who have any digital connection to them whatsoever when they give too much information to companies like Facebook.
it is most certainly valid to point out how inappropriate it would be to begin giving Facebook a whole new class of sensitive, personal content for which they can mishandle and sell to foreign governments for illicit or unethical purposes.
I’m not sure this is an obvious perspective to most people in America.
I’m very pro public awareness which educates the layman on what information these companies are collecting, how they’re using it, and how long it can affect you for.
Especially for the older generations which seem more susceptible to actual fake news, and may have a lesser understanding of what this tech is and how it works.
And especially for younger generations who may not instinctively realize that every button they click, picture they post, and website they browse is being mined, logged, harvested, aggregated, and sold to anyone who asks for it with a couple bucks to spare.
Also, as the parent to your comment stated, I didn’t know there was a data breach Wednesday, and I’m a software engineer.
It’s funny. When the media doesn’t cover something enough, people say “why is CNN talking about the Kardashians?? Climate change is happening!”. Seems the converse occurs too “Why is the NYT covering this again!”
Why don't we talk about the NYT's fairly open pro data-privacy bias - which is actually what it is.
> You’re in private mode. Log in or create a free New York Times account to continue reading in private mode.
Times Editorial could publish articles criticizing Times Corporate, but while I would be very disappointed if Times Corporate was given a free pass, I don't expect them to receive extra scrutiny either.
And if Times Corporate isn't getting extra scrutiny, how much of a story would there be? The Times's data privacy practices, while not ideal, are nowhere near the level of what's going on at Google and Facebook.
Why are you attributing bad faith to the commenter?
It's a reasonable objection, and many have questioned whether its the moral duty of facebook engineers to quit over privacy issues. Blocking privacy mode is an extremely aggressive and intrusive stance, although some other publications followed suit. NYT is especially heavy on tracking [0] The journalist who write for the Times should take personal responsibility and find a different company or profession. I have a feeling the journalists are smart enough that they know they can find employment elsewhere.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/23/opinion/data-...
Because people don't like feeling wrong, even if they aren't particularly wrong, and I've seen many otherwise very intelligent people say and do really stupid things when confronted with information that contradicts their beliefs. Just to be clear this does not make said commenter a bad person, it just makes them a human, with a brain that does occasionally really shitty things when it doesn't want to think.
It's less about attributing bad faith and more just acknowledging that we're all imperfect talking chimps here.
> It's a reasonable objection, and many have questioned whether its the moral duty of facebook engineers to quit over privacy issues.
I would never say another person needs to quit a job over ethical issues, because anyone of decent moral fiber and an objective mind is probably already wrestling with that problem, and having a disinterested third party dispensing advice from On High with zero skin in the game is not going to improve that situation. Alternatively, they could just not care, which is less likely, but also not going be affected by that same third party. Basically what I'm saying is there are numerous possibilities in that interaction but none lead to change, so I don't discuss it. It's moot.
All I'm saying is that the problem of making money in journalism is something that has no clear solution, and acting like the NYT is being hypocritical for using trackers while railing against trackers is a clear example of the Ad Hominem fallacy.
If this is the case, why is NYT showing absolutely no innovation in monetizing their platform?
> I have a feeling you're smart enough to know that's not the case and so you're resorting to a just plain bad argument
Insulting and unsubstantiated; how nice.
Because they don't have ideas? I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take with such a complex problem that so many other companies are having a difficult time solving. Why expend further resources trying to fling more shit at the wall to see what sticks, when your current modal, albeit not ideal, does serve the purpose?
Not everyone has to be, or even should be an innovator. The NYT should be innovating on better and newer techniques of journalism, since that's what they do. It's not like Apple created a new bank for Apple Card to try and make it better, they contracted that part of a product they wanted to offer to a 3rd party that already knew how to do it, and I'd imagine if a revenue model came along that suited them, they'd do the same thing and dump trackers and ad-tech. It's likely they're just waiting for that.
> Insulting and unsubstantiated; how nice.
I mean, it was unsubstantiated, yes, but I think it was also a positive-leaning assumption? I'm not sure why you're insulted by that, but I apologize.
I'm not sure why you are trying to do it for them.
I'm also unsure why folks think they haven't had specific goals/slants in editorial picking/writing in the past. This is not a new phenomenon, for any newspaper.
I happen to think this kind of thing has been fairly destructive to the credibility of newspapers over the past 20-30 years, but what do i know.
Is there a source for this? It's pretty bold to claim they've admitted to criticizing tech companies out of spite. Especially when there are justifiable reasons for trying take them to task, such as Facebook's privacy record.
The tipping poing was the Trump victory. Before the election the NYT and other mainstream media outlets were trumpeting how much better/hipper the DNC was at using social platforms to organize voters than the Republican party. If Clinton would have won, this characterization would have remained and anybody complaning about Russian interference in elections would have been branded a McCarthyist.
Implying that journalism has no value and people should mechanically make.. accounting software apps for a large organisation instead of uncovering and presenting information about those in power is hideous.
It's no surprise that Trump supporters are all over it.
If it's not in the public's face at least semi-regularly, they'll forget.
An editorial is typically just an opinion piece on a currently relevant topic, and that's exactly what this is.
Not every article needs to be an in-depth feature with peer reviewed analysis.
Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.
That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.
In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
I agree with your second sentence entirely. To be clear, criticizing tech is completely fair and important. My point is that the NYT, it seems to me, is pushing this a little too hard. I think the evidence for that is in fairly thin-pretext articles like this one, or the Amazon driver liability "investigation".
> Contrary to popular believe the real problem with privacy violations isn't "that some creep might be listening in on your most private moments – the real problem is the power that stems from that information asymmetry on a societal level. In a democracy systems like these are the ones that never should have been – read this in the most frankensteinian tone you can imagine.
I half agree with you here. I do think these systems being put in place have tremendous social consequences. Unfortunately though, I think the ships have sailed, and I don't really see regulation or anything much else putting them back to port. People have voted with their feet and they simply don't value privacy the way you or I do.
> That being said: this ismy opinion and at the same time I am a DIY persons, I build soft and hardware – but being a good tech person also means that you shouldn't blindly praise every "smart" thing that has a microcontroller in it, if it performs worse than the 30 year old version of the same thing your grandma has in her kitchen. Being a good tech person means realizing that electronic voting has fundamental conceptual flaws that the oldschool paper version hasn't or realizing that sometimes a sleek and modern looking touchscreen isn't the best interface to choose for your application.
> In short: if you love tech, don't lie to yourself about what it is and what it isn't. If you love tech, have the respect to see it for what it is and what (in the right hands) it could be.
Wholeheartedly agree here.
What's more concerning than the NYT fulfilling its primary function is the occasional apologia in the HN comments, by people who (if we want to talk about bias), probably have a stake in perpetuating the state of affairs.
Having a digital log of your love life and exchanges can have an impact. That is not an "anti-tech"-assessment. Maybe the article is boring to you, but I see dire need of more
NYT is certainly biased and they have have their own mostly economic incentives regarding big-tech. That has nothing to do with technology itself.
This is an opinion piece. In pretty much every newspaper I skip this section.
Broadly speaking, there are large swaths of the population for whom the New York Times (and, on the other side, Wall Street Journal and Fox News) anti-tech “biases” resonate. Not just emotionally, but because big tech has repeatedly and callously burned those groups.
They are looking to organise. Finding common arguments and common allies is part of the political process the Fourth Estate catalyses.
Would you like me to go on?
I'm taking issue with the idea that there is a large group of people that has unilaterally been harmed by tech that isn't defined as "the people that have been harmed by tech".
A counterexample might be "people harmed by car accidents" -- there are a lot of those too, year after year, yet we don't see a column dedicated to anti-automobile narratives popping up in the nytimes. I'd hazard a guess that it's because car accidents affect only a small portion of all groups (or just very small groups) no matter how you slice them -- unless you slice the entire population into two sets of "people harmed by car accidents" and that set's compliment.
Not only that, but unlike with car accidents we would all have a very difficult time agreeing what constitutes the group of "people harmed by tech". Some pro-privacy advocate might want to include all people on the ad-sponsored internet in that group. You apparently want to include taxi drivers and journalists. These are some very strange bedfellows that can only be cobbled together in the most tenuous way using a narrative that scapegoats tech companies in general.
Addressing push back about specific changes made by specific companies from specific groups? I've got no problem with that. Cover it all day. Grouping all of these issues into one big narrative and pointing a mob of angry pitchfork bearing people at it telling them that these companies are the source of all your problems? Yikes, that seems like it could go really really badly!
Sure. We work in tech, and see that the web has hurt the newspaper business model. Therefore, we protect our ego in the face of any criticism from the traditional press towards tech by rationalizing it away as vindictive rather than ask ourselves if the criticisms are valid and would also be written by a healthier press. And by casting it as a bias, we can avoid contemplating if more tech-savvy reporters would have noticed how morally bankrupt "tech" is sooner and/or provide sharper and more knowledgeable criticism that doesn't rely on poor approximations of goings-on in a domain inscrutable to laypersons.
These are some of the largest companies in the world, make decisions that effect the lives of billions but act like their shit doesn't stink and don't want people looking to closely at the societal ramifications of their business model.
If anything, I'd say the press is too kind and deferential to the half-truths their PR departments pump out.
There are maybe 2 or 3 major companies (Mozilla, Apple?) that have shown any interest in protecting their users privacy and not abusing and mining all the data they collect from their users, who have unsurprisingly not understood the implications of the massive amount of data that can be collected over the past decade or so.
People still see Tech as benign, but it has been twisted from the early starry-eyed technologists who wanted to change the world for the better, and it has become just another big industry power block that looks after only it's own profits to the exclusion of everything else.
Especially when they’re in competition with bricks and mortar stores that can’t use “double Dutch” and “double Irish” tax dodges.
The tax evasion is a very important, but more general and unfortunately pervasive problem of our society. I believe we'll do it a disservice if we try to target it narrowly like that. It will get drowned out by whataboutism and the bigger but specific issues. None of that can derail it when looking at the bigger picture.
Politicians have more to say about chicken sandwiches, library story time, and and NFL pregames when their actual job is exactly this sort of problem, not being professional culture pundits.
We allow people to enter into all sorts of arrangements where they compromise their rights, such as by giving up their right to sue in court or not seeking employment in the same industry.
We allow people to enter into onerous credit card agreements, and we all agree that it is voluntary. And we say that when an 18 year old youth purchases cigarettes, that again, they are exercising their intellect in an act of agency.
And then we come to the issue of software licenses, which also begs the question as people trade privacy for services, "Yes, you are an individual of formidable agency, are you not?"
We have to face it: we’re not helping the world.
Now we’re in a similar place with tech. Tech entrepreneurs have been branded as ”disruptors” saving us from the establishment for the better part of two decades but now there’s a bigger diversity of spins on these tech stories, leaning a bit on the negative side. I think the pendulum will swing back to positive if these companies get their act together and do more to protect users, and especially if the governments bust their monopolies. That would maybe generate a lot of sympathy.
1) There's a general anti-tech sentiment that is a huge defining part of our zeitgeist. It's only a few years old and I'm already tired of it and articles like this one contribute to the fatigue.
2) The NYT is leaning very hard into this fad for a variety of reasons - good for their bottom line, good for their self-image, etc. There was a very funny one a few weeks ago where the NYT "took down" Google's terrible ToS - until someone (in the comments) pointed out the NYT one was even worse. If you're shouting and pointing at someone else, people won't have time to look at you.
3) Lately, I keep being reminded of the Selfish Gene, which has a few chapters devoted to Evolutionary Stable Strategies. In essence, Tech has gotten so big that being a "tech critic" has become a lucrative (high reward/low cost) position to take, like being a cheater in a monogamous population. Any environment can support a certain percentage of such defectors, though if there are suddenly too many, it stops being lucrative and a new stable equilibrium will be reached. I highly recommend it, it has really helped me make sense of these rapid shifts.
The biggest and richest tech companies all abuse the privacy of their so-called customers. The customers don't really own or control the devices they buy any more, nor do they control the software. The companies decide at their discretion which version is used and if someone is allowed to use a piece of software.
Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook could instantly cut anyone from their online lives and they are able to disable physical devices and locally downloaded applications.
Most of the big tech companies are ruthless monopolies which are exploiting people with deeply addictive apps, hoovering up every tiny detail of their lives, and selling it to advertisers while also frequently losing that information to hackers, and being used by autocratic foreign governments to swing elections to candidates that suit their purposes.
So it's right that there's an anti-tech sentiment, and it's right that privacy concerns are reported on.
I dream of a world free of editorials, or at least a HN front page without them.
Seems an uptick in flame bait editorials as of late.
Would it be reasonable to assume the title Don't Trust Facebook with Your Love Life could possibly only be opinion? Would a reasonable person expect to see data-driven research after clicking through?
Yes, in a font smaller than and above the title that is very light against the background and reasonably easy to miss.
> Would it be reasonable to assume the title Don't Trust Facebook with Your Love Life could possibly only be opinion? Would a reasonable person expect to see data-driven research after clicking through?
Perhaps it's a clickbait title with real substance, or perhaps a great research piece. The only way to know is to read it.
I get that reading is involuntary for literate adults, but I believe it is possible to not engage with the words beyond that.
Perhaps you should heed your own advice.
They have sections, and the op-Ed’s and Eds are only in the opinion section.
Perhaps on the paper, or the site itself. On HN it is not reasonably obvious.
Going online, paired with the rise of social media changed what it meant for content to be "good" - redefined it to share worthy and click based, monetized mostly by ads. Now, no one, including the famed NYT does good classical journalism - they do what gets them shares and clicks.
On closer examination of social media demographics, you can see why news has pivoted to opinion - because millennials share and click more of it, especially the opinions they approve of.
A demographic shift in HN user base is also likely the reason for more opinion making it to the top of the charts
Now, before "the internet" (read: its commercial, world-wide success), in-depth research was costly, and it could not be copied easily. Newspapers had a reputation to hold up. It was easier to compete on information. Now the competition is much more fierce, and many people make/share news gratis, so it ends up competing with "free" is difficult.
As for NYT, there's some good people working there like Runa Sandvik, but I guess it works like every large news organization...
This doesn't mean that "big tech" isn't worthy of criticism or scrutity, but it can both be true that there are legitimate complaints about these companies and that traditional media outlets are going overboard with endless attacks on them due to external agendas.
Is it a "bias" if they're right?
As much as tech companies try to make them self look up small upstarts fighting uphill battle, they are one of the most influential industry of our time.
In 90s there were oil companies and tobacco companies on the front pages, now it's tech companies time.
Nah. They made the point that dating apps in particular collect a lot of deeply personal info, that Facebook is using it as an opportunity to merge data from your Instagram and Facebook accounts, that dating profiles will be separate from Facebook profiles.
But most importantly, this is an opinion piece.
It logically points out that letting Facebook be your dating app is a bad idea if you value your privacy.
And how could you make that point more effectively than by listing Facebook's record on privacy?
>Follow @privacyproject on Twitter and The New York Times Opinion Section on Facebook and Instagram.
https://www.nytimes.com/by/charlie-warzel
"Before that, he was a senior technology writer at BuzzFeed News" (that alone explains a lot)
And almost all of these are posted here
Whether it’s lavishing praise on Mohammed bin Salman and the Saudi elite, cheerleading the Iraq war, reporting as if the #MeToo movement was somehow localized entirely in Hollywood and not experienced by normal people, desperately bolstering Hillary with Bernie hit piece after Bernie hit piece, adding constant fuel to the dumpster fire that is the US culture war, or totally clueless tech reporting, it has been become worse and worse with each passing year in my opinion.
I was a subscriber for many years and recently cancelled and it’s been wonderful to distance myself from the clickbait.
Certainly, there are big problems with some aspects of tech and they ought to be reported on. But it seems like there's something a bit more going on here than that, given their willingness to publish silly, conceptually thin articles like this. This entire editorial is essentially content free. The only point it makes is to summarize Facebook's shortcomings, which didn't require the launch of a new dating feature to do, if it had something new to say. But it didn't, so it used FB's announcement as a pretext to publish a set of stock criticisms.