Articles from The Patch have been everywhere recently; for those who haven’t seen them, they are positioning themselves as a news aggregator that sells themselves as a hyper-local news source. They are aggressively using the Nextdoor app in order to get their stories out to a wider audience.
No issues there…at the Arizona Progress & Gazette, we also consider ourselves to be quite local and fixated on Scottsdale and Arizona as a whole. But there are serious concerns about how The Patch is operating, how intrusive it is, and how it approaches privacy and data security.
As always, the devil is in the details, and more specifically on the fine print that no reasonable people actually read. In their own words, “Patch does not “sell” Personal Information that on its own identifies you – such as your name or email address – without your permission.” As always however, the “without your permission” does the heavy lifting with this statement, as it is almost certainly buried in that fine print.
This is even more distressing when one sees who Patch is doing business with, in this particular case with one Arizona hospital that is doing its best to shoehorn its way into the Scottsdale market in the face of strong opposition against Banner Health.
It is not the best look for a company with some potentially disconcerting business practices to team up with a company that is looking to defy the will of its citizenry.
For what it’s worth, there is no fine print with our blog. We absolutely will not and never will sell or otherwise market the email addresses of our subscribers, so you can head to arizonaprogressgazette.com and hit that Subscribe button with no privacy concerns at all.