Hacker News Reader

Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

OK, so you believe Google and the NYT are so different in scope that it's silly to compare them at all, as it would be to compare Little League to MLB, or 2 entirely sports even? I agree with that, which is why I argue that the purported hypocrisy of the NYT's policy is trivial – nevermind that the reporters do not have executive power over site and business operations, nor do we know that they aren't pushing for reform in their own house.

If the president of the World Curling Federation were to publish an op-ed on how the NFL's policies and protocols were inadequate in protecting players from permanent brain injuries, would "How big is curling's global audience and revenue compared to the NFLs?" or "How many pages does the WCF policy book devote to concussion protocols?" be relevant angles of rebuttal?

View on HN

You're dodging the point here - the point is that the scope of the privacy policy should correspond to the scope of the business. And the NY Times privacy policy has basically the same scope as Google's privacy policy, despite them not providing useful services at the same scale. The evolution of Google's privacy policy in fact is about the increase in the scope of Google's business.

It's not so much hypocrisy as the fact Google's collection and use of data is skewed towards providing better services to consumers while New York Times's (and their partners' through the site/app) collection and use of data is skewed towards monetization.

As I said in another comment, you are seriously underestimating the size of the NYT. By many metrics, it's the largest global news organization based in the US and one of the largest in the world. Certainly larger than CBC, CNN, FNC, NBC News and about the same size of the BBC (and a bit smaller than Reuters and AP).

Their data collection helps them decide where to build new news bureaus and news rooms and also what content they should surface to their readers. I get a very California focused NYT vs my friends who live in NYC and London.

Also, I'm sure a chunk of their privacy policy is actually impacted by using Google as their ad service and a passthrough from Google's to them.

I'm not underestimating anything at all - how many news organizations have apps that run on Android? How many of them run Google ads? Google's privacy policy has to account for all of that. And all of that is a relatively small business compared to Google's cash cows. They are not at all comparable in terms of scale or diversity of services offered. Yet, in terms of privacy policy, they are quite comparable. Back when Google's business was at NYT's scale, its privacy policy was considerably shorter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com