> Editorial: It's startling to me how outfits as reputable as NYT can time and again parrot a narative (e.g., FB is better than sliced bread), and then after the fact report on something that was right under their nose all along.
That is almost completely a problem of the format of news articles, and that journalists have to write for a lowest common denominator. Take as an example from the NYT article:
> Details of Facebook’s partnerships have emerged amid a reckoning in Silicon Valley over the volume of personal information collected on the internet and monetized by the tech industry.
That, plus the next paragraph, is basically the entire context the NYT can give about a discussion about privacy that ranges from the inception of the Internet, spawned numerous NGOs like the EFF, etc. To present an sort of accurate picture, they would need a five volume work, so they have to rely on their readers already knowing something about internet privacy, and this is only meant as a reminder.
The same problem seems to be with the entire article, the NYT seems to define "third party" as any party that is not Facebook, while Facebook defines "third party" as app developer. If I understand the NYT article, and Facebook's press release [0], the entire kerfuffle seems to be about an legacy api that can only be accessed by device makers, and it is entirely unclear if device makers have to exfiltrate the data from the individual devices, or if they have access to FB's databases. [1]
The problem in the context of writing articles is, that one needs a quite technical article of the same length as this one to explain the lowest common denominator news reader what the difference between those two scenarios is. (Remember the average reader does not know what an api is, does not know what local or remote means in the context of handheld devices, does not know the difference between an OS and an app, and in general is not a programmer.)
The quality of news gets even worse, because market pressures push newspapers like the NYT to conform to a certain set of newsworthy topics and to a specific framing of these topics. They have to adhere to a certain set of newsworthy topics, because people who talk with their co-workers about news don't really appreciate it, if their newspaper did not write anything about the topic. And they are pushed to a specific telling of these topics, because some of their readers are checking different newspapers and if they have incompatible framing of the news, then those readers will at some point conclude that the majority of newspapers is right.
[0] https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/06/why-we-disagree-with-th...
(h/t to whoever posted it in the comments)
[1] Note, in the first case FB did constrain the ability of the device makers to access data on the phone, by getting them to sign TOS of the api. In the second case, FB is just lying about a breach of privacy for any reasonable definition of "third party."