Honestly, I find NYTs privacy articles to be full of errors and deliberate omissions to drive the agenda. It's seriously made me question about their reputation.
I’m still in a state of outrage/shock over their article on the “far right” joining telegram in the millions in the aftermath of the capitol riots.
There I was, a week or two removed from helping my roommate move his gigantic Nigerian family group chat away from WhatsApp when [0] pops up in my HN feed.
They actually implied most of those millions of new Telegram users, 94% of which weren’t even in North America, were motivated entirely by the capitol riots.
Completely omitting the fact the WhatsApp -> FB data sharing message was sent to every single user in the world on that very same day, January 6th.
I think the same is true of just about any non-specialist reporting organisation. Find the reporting they do on a subject on which you're an expert, and see how much they get wrong. Don't write them off for it—everybody gets stuff wrong—but read the stories on the material about which you're not expert with the same skepticism.
It's far more likely that the errors are because the editors are non-technical and they seem to have one primary author. It could reflect his bias or his ignorance.