This seems pretty disingenuous given the range of services offered by Google and New York Times - New York Times is a regional publication that doesn't really have any reason to know your location besides ads, while Google offers a free mobile operating system that millions of apps run on top of, many of which (including their own) use the location capabilities of the platform to provide useful services.
Just a nit - calling the NYT a "regional publication" is like calling Google a "california search engine." It's one of the largest global news organizations in the world with active newsrooms in NYC, London, Hong Kong and Paris. It has 6 news bureaus in the NY area, 14 news bureaus in the US outside of the NY area and 23 international news bureaus employing over 1300 news staff. (For reference the BBC has 50, CNN has 32 and the Times' has 46). Its California coverage is as robust as the LATimes and more robust than the SF Chronicle.
Of course, when you have multiple full newsrooms, you care about location capabilities. I get a customized California feed (California Today) when I go to it.
Again, this doesn't really compare to Google - if somebody started up a business within Google and only had about New York Times level of success, it may very well be in danger of being shut down. New York Times has about 3 million subscribers. Youtube Premium had 1.5M about a year after launch and it's on life support. Youtube Music has 16 million subscribers a year after launch and it's barely successful enough not to be cut. These are ancillary services run by small teams. Google has Android, Chrome, Search, GMail, Maps, Photos, Calendar, etc, etc, many of them actually manage lots of your data on your behalf and/or require real-time location capabilities. Of course providing these services requires a long privacy policy if they want to honestly cover what they do with user data.
"California Today" needing a location capability - I'm not sure if you're entirely serious. Why would it need to access your current location - people read local news for where they live, not where they happen to be. And whether you're in California or not is not something that changes frequently. Nor is California Today a travel guide - it has no relevance for people who happen to be in California. Do you actually know if it's based on your real time location? I doubt it. And even if it was, it doesn't have to be.
Also looking at this - https://www.nytimes.com/column/california-today - it consists of an article every other day or so? This is why they need the location data? And it doesn't look like it's a customized feed at all - seems like everyone gets the exact same feed. What data do they need to put this together? And it looks like they have a signup sheet - https://www.nytimes.com/newsletters/signup/CA - are you sure they don't automatically sign you up based on your permanent address? I mean, consider the level of location access (frequency and granularity) needed to show New York news vs California news and compare that against, say, turn-by-turn navigation.
Also I just downloaded the app and it has "Australia" as a top-level section by default (I'm in the US). Are you sure user location is used meaningfully for anything in the app?
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?
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.
