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Now The Washington Post Misleadingly Complains About Google & Apple Protecting Your Privacy Too Much

Now The Washington Post Misleadingly Complains About Google & Apple Protecting Your Privacy Too Much

4 years ago
Anonymous $-9GJQVHNr8

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200518/01022544516/now-washington-post-misleadingly-complains-about-google-apple-protecting-your-privacy-too-much.shtml

Both the NY Times and the Washington Post have been among the most vocal in attacking internet companies like Google and Facebook, claiming that they're bad regarding your privacy. Yet, like with France (who fined Google for its privacy practices, but then got mad at the company over the privacy-protecting features of its COVID contact tracing API), the Washington Post has a very, very weird article complaining about Google and Apple's project because it's too protective of people's privacy. We've talked in the past about how the API (jointly developed between Apple and Google) was designed from the ground up to be privacy protective. And you know damn well that if the API wasn't developed as such there would be huge articles in the Washington Post and elsewhere decrying this API as a threat to everyone's privacy. Yet here, the complaint is that it's too protective, because these companies simply can't win.

John Gruber, over at Daring Fireball, has an excellent post explaining just how spectacularly bad the Washington Post article is, but we'll do our own treatment as well.