Wall Street Journal's "cookie madness," and conflict of interest on privacy reporting

Over at Romenesko/Poynter, Bill Brazell (who used to work with Boing Boing via Federated Media) writes: "It's been disturbing to read the Wall Street Journal's ongoing "What They Know" privacy series without finding a disclosure notifying readers of the Journal's grave conflict of interest. As Jeff Jarvis and others have suggested, the Journal's use of a pay wall may even motivate the stories' fear-mongering tone. Actually, the conflict is deeper: The Journal should disclose at the beginning of every privacy story it publishes that it collects and sells Personally Identifiable Information (PII), and that none of the Top 50 publishers listed does so. Indeed, hardly anyone else on the Web does so."