Um, yeah, they added to their policy whenever they added to the services they offer. A policy that only encompasses Google search pre-monetization would be fairly useless in 2019. What else were they supposed to do?
NY TImes Privacy Policy page has 2 advertising trackers. This page has 5. So they are tracking you even when you are reading about privacy.
"The New York Times privacy policy is 5.2K words. It contains basically everything that they're criticizing Google for. And a bit more. Apparently NYT will by default sell (sorry, "rent") your name and postal address to direct mail advertisers."
You should make a note to hold your employer accountable too.
Your Google and Facebook articles keep you relevant right now, but every time the editorial department reports on tech, make sure to check and report on how your corporation conforms to society's unease as well.
1
The New York Times Privacy Policy is a HILARIOUS 5119 words. That's FIVE THIOUSAND ONE HUNDRED AND NINETEEN words. And these clowns are complaining about a 4000 word privacy policy from a tech giant? The hypocrisy knows no end.
Unlike Google, though, the New York Times actually shares (sells) your data to third parties:
With Whom Do We Share The Personal Information We Gather?
A) Sharing Within The New York Times
B) Sharing With Service Providers.
C) Sharing With Other Third Parties.
D) Compliance With Legal Process
E) By Using the NYT Services, You May Elect to Disclose Personal Information
Other Information Collected Using Technology:
1. Device Information
2. Cookies, Beacons, Local Storage and Other Similar Technologies.
3. Analytics, Log Files and Reading History
4. Location Information
5. Third-Party Advertising
It's all right here. It's there dirty little secret they don't you to read through. Funny how they attack Google when the New York Times privacy policy is probably worse than Facebook.
https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/115014892108-Privacy-policy
Check out Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee for more information on what Google, Facebook, and Amazon are up to - and how they can be reined in.
I can't believe that Google is financing the anti-science and climate-change-denying Competitive Enterprise Institute. I suppose they see it as a bet hedge to keep antitrust laws from breaking up big tech. However, it just goes to show that they are just as callous and opportunistic as any behemoth corporation, despite their "woke" veneer.
I've come to dislike Google intensely for so many reasons. I suggest to reporters at the NYT that they'd be doing a great service to their readers who are looking for other options if they would do a story on other options. Namely, when new product comes on board competing with Google it'd be great to know if it's better in terms of privacy, whether or not the product is developed in the US, background on the principals, etc.
I have a theory that one of the main reasons why Google and Amazon are so entrenched is because we've become so frightened of security issues that we're now afraid to sign up on new tools since we already have ones that are working acceptably. I've already given up much to the likes of Google and FB and am afraid of signing up to yet another exploit. But I would LOVE another option to Google/YouTube. Google, FB, Twitter, etc. may not realize it yet, but there are many of us who are seething at their behavior in terms of privacy, censorship, etc. and are ready to jump ship at the first opportunity. And yes, many, many of us are on the Left.
2
I still remember clearly back in the 1980s, after the World Wide Web first came in and the Mozilla browser was released, when I was watching UHF TV late at night. I saw the first TV ad that included at the end a URL for the company website. I thought wow, that is so cool, they’re on the Web! Little did I know I was seeing the very first intrusion of corporate capitalism into what was then the open digital world of public information sharing. At that point, “the Web” seemed like the ultimate freedom of information vehicle. My naïveté now seems so embarrassing. I should have known that Big Money would take over that new world of individual empowerment.
2
This is an incredible piece of reporting.
1
I keep telling my 17 year old daughter that, when the ice caps have melted, Miami is under 20 feet of water, and most of humanity is struggling to eek out a very meager existence, they are going to mightily regret all this unneeded data that was collected and stored in all these massive server farms whose electrical power requirements caused untold amounts of carbon to be released into the atmosphere.
2
"By reading this you have given Google power of attorney."
2
Yes, it is a free service but that doesn't mean they get to trawl my data for everything I do online. The EU monitors them to a greater extent and sets limits on their data collection. They make it almost impossible to limit them and even when we deny permission they collect anyway. That is wrong. Regulate all of them-fb, apple, google, etc.
I read a book defending Google and Microsoft and against Facebook, called Bitwise by David Auerbach. Yet when I went back to look at some of the research I did by Googling things, I noticed Google took down the pages or patents. I think they're all bums. Google search also returns racist results. For instance, if you type in "where" the first thing that showed up for me for the longest time was "where my refund at?" which has racially biased connotations.
Good job Charley and Ash. A study in the best of technical writing: assimilating a morass of data and deliberate obfuscation, then laying it out clearly and concisely so even a moderately internet-savvy user can understand. (I.e., those who *want* to understand, apparently a distinct minority of users.)
Next job should be with Elizabeth Warren's campaign. She did for the credit card industry what you two did for the surveillance industry. For all of the good it has done us....
As this is all a private market, the us Constitution 4th amendment does not apply here. Bummer.
1
The headline of the opinion leads with "Google's 4000-word privacy policy ..." presumably implying that the length is relevant to transparency.
Scrolling down to the NYT policy, a word count reveals the NYTimes privacy policy has ... wait for it ... 5,119 words 32,243 characters
6
Yesterday I I did one-time internet searches for "compost bin plans" and "dishpan/drainer sets." This morning the top of my on-line NYT front page was emblazoned with five ads for composters and dish racks.
2
At the bottom of this article is a link to the NYT privacy policy, which turns out to be 5,125 words long. If the length of a privacy policy is somehow proportional to the likelihood that a company trying to hide consumer unfriendly practices (as the article implies), what does this say about the Times?
9
First, YouTube was never a glimmer in Google's eye. They bought it after it was already a huge sensation, like how Microsoft bought Hotmail.
Second, the NYTImes privacy policy shows it's over 5000 words, 25% more than Google's and you only report the news and allow comments.
These privacy policies are not to inform, but to obfuscate. They do not protect users; they protect themselves.
23
Remember when Google had the vision statement "Do no harm". They must have said it with their fingers crossed behind their backs and a team of lawyers on standby. Greed has a funny way of blurring the lines.
3
Their motto was "Don't be evil," not "Do no harm."
Why does this sound like jealousy and envy on the NYT's part?
Oh, no, they ate your lunch and now they have gone for your dinner.
This looks like a millennial Silicon Valley sandwich.
4
Thanks for this valuable analysis and information. It's this kind of of journalism that has some of the most actionable value for citizens liberties.
1
The shift merely reflects the evolution of audience of the Internet from those looking for information to a platform for users looking out to connect to each other.
Google is systematically and rapidly taking over the digital infrastructure of our K-12 schools. This is done under the pretense that Google is officially a school "official" under the direct control of the local school board. If anyone actually believes that any local school board has direct control of what Google is doing with student data, I have some land on the Florida Coast to sell them.
2
For readers following "The Privacy Project" I strongly recommend Shoshana Zuboff's recent book "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism." She argues that Google/Amazon/Facebook represent not just a new business model but a new form of capitalism, built around the mining, translation into data, and commodification as "prediction products" of our private behavior. It's no longer remotely adequate just to say "You have no privacy, so get over it." Our privacy has been collectively colonized by these enterprises, so that it can be used as raw material for products that will not only predict but also control--"nudge," "condition," "tune"--our future behavior, in the interests of surveillance capital. The ambitions of this project, Zuboff argues convincingly, are total: to know everything about us, to predict with certainty, to "condition" our behavior such that predictions may be certain.
Her book deserves close attention for anyone interested in the matters under discussion here.
5
Okay, so I have no privacy, and I sorta kinda am getting over it. Why? Because there's nothing I can do about it.
I shop online. Every transaction results in a trove of data. Do I stop shopping online?
I search online. On my iPhone I use Safari. On my computer I use Google/Chrome. I set the default search engine on another browser to DuckDuckGo. I don't use that browser because it's not as user friendly as Chrome, which I know is a surveillance browser. Frankly, I just want info. I don't want to agonize over browsers and search engines.
I have a FB account I don't use and an Instagram account I do. I click on ads. more data.
I have several GPS apps on my phone as well as a location app for use within my family.
And as long as I choose to use these services, I am at the mercy of companies worth trillions of dollars and that can afford to parse every single word in their use agreements and privacy policies to give take away absolutely all of my rights.
What's the alternative? So, I'll read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and I'll bet I'll feel even more helpless. So much for the claims of the early internet to bring us together and make life just that much easier, and more interesting.
Yeah, right.
12
We could have laws that suggest our data is only used for the purpose of the transaction and nothing more without a clear OPT IN for just a few small privacy elements (like collect to provide personalized ads and offers; provide so others can market to me). When we give our credit card information to buy something, we expect that data is only needed to make the payment go through, not for anything more. An email, text message or other "posting" sent through a service has no reason to expect it's being analyzed at all beyond the transfer of my message to the recipients.
1
Matt,
I advise against despair. So does Zuboff. She draws a telling analogy with 19th-century industrial capitalism, which "discovered" that individual labor and the natural world could be totally commodified, and then proceeded towards the destruction of both-the new working class, and the natural environment-- claiming that the "laws of the market" made that destruction inevitable-in the interests of capital. Marx thought this process was inexorable, and predicted revolution, but he was wrong. Instead, civil and political society in Europe and the US rose up against capital's ideology of inevitability, and, in short, regulated it, with child labor laws, safety laws, union rights, environmental regulations, and so on.
Whether or not you see that as a success story, it shows that the supposed logic of inevitability has alwasy been a PR scheme for capital. You're right. Surveillance capital is hard to resist. But it's altogether resistable.
4
While I trust Google more than Amazon and Bezos; I don't trust either entirely.
Generally, I believe I can trust Amazon and Google services, there are times that on-premise systems make the most sense, especially with dealing with the latest alpha prototypes in self awareness, where network access must be constrained to the LAN, with zero wireless (of any kind whatsoever), and a 100% isolated LAN for a large cluster, for self aware AI testing.
1
It's easy to not worry because in the end they have no real power over you. You can be inconvenienced to have to switch providers to stop tweeting or whatever, but that's pretty small compared to a government that collects all your data (NSA) and soon all our health care records (Medicare for All).
Easy to follow analytic piece.
The use of a VPN is not addressed.
I'd like to know if using a VPN depersonalizes, anonymizes your data and searches?
2
Generally it does not. At best, it masks your IP address, and that has some tracking benefits, but since most IP addresses of users use DHCP, a given user doesn't have a single IP address. A VPN will keep your data no more secure than HTTPS does already, and it will protect your non-HTTPS requests over public wifis. But in the end, you will login to gmail/aol/hotmail/hulu/netflix/NYTimes or whatever, and then the tracking is the same as ever before.
If you anonymize your connection to the internet, such as through TOR, Google will not provide you service.
Thank you! Good to know.
Are Incognito tabs fair game? Is there really no such thing as an Incognito tab?
Incognito tabs can help in terms of not explicitly sharing information across websites (i.e. from the use of cookies), but websites can track your "digital fingerprint" -- a combination of the browser you're using, settings (font, screen size, browser preferences), etc. to identify who you are, even though you're in an incognito tab. It's a bit of a game of cat and mouse.
That doesn't do much to protect your privacy other than after you close them, the web site, history and cookies on your computer are not saved. But all sites you visited still track you like always.
Glad I stopped using Google Search and G+ and only use gmail and YouTube (who knew they had so many documentaries?!). I also installed an ad blocker, use Duckduckgo for search since they don't track you, and opt-out of everything that I can. No social media, either. What started out as such a revolutionary idea in search engines turned into corporate America. Sad.
3
Yeah, google knows nothing other than your personal emails and what you watch for entertainment or learning.
Gmail is Google.
Why are you posting on a site that has a 5119 word privacy policy that says they sell/share your data? Maybe you should read the times privacy policy.
This is simply the way of business. As more lawyers get involved, they don't have any feeling of self-worth unless they add or change something in a pre-existing document. Naturally, it grows.
Lawyer bloatware.
8
No, these get longer to avoid being sued by lawyers and governments that want their money by force.