A good number of journalists are creating accounts on post.news, so I figured I’d take a look and see what the fuss is about.
Surprisingly, the privacy practices of post.news aren’t great. The founder behind post.news is experienced; they have VC funding, and prominent journalists are supporting the site, and it would be great if they could make some improvements in their basic privacy practice.
The issues include a convoluted and illogical definition of “consent”, a statement that says they can share de-identified user data “with any other third party, at our sole discretion”, and use of a third party commenting system (OpenWeb) that has its own issues.
This writeup is not definitive; I spent about thirty minutes looking at the terms, and 10 minutes making the screencast. In general, when basic issues like the ones I describe in the screencast are readily visible, it’s a sign that other more profound issues also exist.
This post, however, does not delve into these details. My hope is that someone (or someones, like, who knows, maybe one of the journalists tripping over themselves to get on the waitlist) will actually perform a detailed act of journalism.