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Tech, mostly Apple, from Lex Friedman.

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Opinion

Someone tell The New York Times I have more than one device

I pay for a New York Times digital subscription. It gets me access to their word games (I like word games), and to their reporting (which I sometimes like and sometimes abhor). But what my subscription also gets me is endless annoyance. The New York Times constantly prompts me to upgrade to a family plan that I don’t need, and endlessly makes me validate my login by emailing a code, which it promises to remember for 24 hours.

The New York Times, like Netflix and HBO and Spotify before it, is attempting to crack down on family sharing. When family members all share a login, opportunities to make more money off the same family get trickier.

But here’s the thing: I’m not sharing my login. It’s mine and mine alone.

NYT “Confirm your account” prompt: “We noticed multiple devices using this subscription,” with an email-code button.

And I want to read stories in The New York Times on my iPhone, iPad, and Mac, in my default browser, and in embedded browsers from apps like Ivory and Indigo. To The New York Times, apparently, this means I’m multiple family members trying to wring more value than I’m paying for.

“We noticed multiple devices using this subscription,” The New York Times tells me. “I notice I own more than one device, you insane app,” I scream into the void.

First of all, let me point out that even if this policy were working as intended, it is batshit crazy. Imagine if I subscribed to the legacy paper edition (gross; newsprint is disgusting). The New York Times wouldn’t charge me extra for handing the paper to my spouse or kid to read an article.

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But even if we think this “family sharing crackdown” is reasonable, the implementation is idiotic. The devices The New York Times keeps flagging are on the same network, visiting from the same IP address. They all visit the site pretty frequently. They’ve all passed the “email code” test repeatedly.

I support a paywall. It is a reasonable business model. But the Times’s implementation is built to be obnoxious, though I’m not abusing my subscription in any way. In fact, we pay for a second subscription, because my wife wants to play NYT’s word games on her own. Our two subscriptions combined cost less than the family plan that The New York Times hounds me with every single day.

The New York Times has somehow built a system where I pay for its content, read its content, and am repeatedly treated like a cheater for accessing the content I’m paying for. I’m not trying to get away with anything. I’m trying to read the news. And if your anti-sharing system can’t distinguish between a family of freeloaders and one guy with a handful of devices and apps, maybe the problem isn’t the subscribers.