The New York Times

What this pass recorded. The Times is one of the news-publisher plaintiffs (with the Center for Investigative Reporting and eight Alden-owned dailies) in the consolidated In re OpenAI copyright MDL (S.D.N.Y.) against OpenAI and Microsoft, and the discovery fight in that case produced the single most consequential consumer-privacy event in the LLM Providers tab: a court order that overrode OpenAI's deletion policy and ultimately pushed 20 million user conversations into discovery, with no user notification reported in the coverage reviewed. That is worth holding as a genuine tension rather than a gotcha - the Times is litigating a legitimate copyright claim, and the collateral effect landed on ChatGPT users who were not party to anything. Cross-ref the OpenAI row. Nothing confirmed against the Times' own consumer data practices this pass.

• Severity
• Evidence tierUnassigned
• Claims confirmed
• Last verified2026-08-04

Primary source. None recorded — Unverified - heuristic first draft.

Arbitration

Not independently confirmed this pass for NYT's own subscriber Terms of Service — standard binding arbitration + class action waiver expected.

Data sharing

RELATED-INDUSTRY FINDING (different company, same underlying pattern worth checking against NYT specifically): a reported (not independently verified this pass) 2026 lawsuit against THE WASHINGTON POST (a direct competitor) alleges the Post used subscriber browsing/cookie data to build profiles enabling 'SURVEILLANCE PRICING' — charging different subscribers different rates for the same subscription based on demographic/behavioral data, allegedly surfaced after a New York algorithmic-pricing disclosure law took effect (effective date not verified). Given how similar major newspaper subscription/paywall business models are, this specific practice is worth directly verifying against the NYT's own current privacy policy and pricing practices, since no NYT-specific surveillance-pricing lawsuit was independently confirmed this pass. SEPARATELY: NYT's OWN COPYRIGHT LAWSUIT against OpenAI (over ChatGPT training data) has generated a notable SIDE EFFECT for ORDINARY CHATGPT USERS: a court initially ordered OpenAI to preserve ALL ChatGPT output data indefinitely as potential evidence, which OpenAI fought as an overreach (in Nov. 2025 Magistrate Judge Ona Wang went further and ordered OpenAI to produce 20 million de-identified ChatGPT logs) that 'risks [users'] privacy without actually helping resolve the lawsuit' — illustrating how a media company's OWN litigation against a THIRD PARTY (OpenAI) can create privacy risk for the third party's separate, unrelated customers (ordinary ChatGPT users).

Contacts

Privacy contact. Not recorded.

Legal notice. Not verified this pass. If publicly traded: SEC Form 10-K cover page gives the official corporate address; the Secretary of State business-entity search in the state of incorporation gives the registered agent, which must accept service. If private: the state registered agent is usually the only reliable route.

Mailing address. Not recorded.