Why a tech reporter tracked her husband for a story

Trevor Timm writes for The New York Times about why his wife, Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill, tracked his location for a day for a story.

Timm writes, “When Kashmir, a technology reporter for The Times, asked for my consent to track me, I was prepared for her to violate my privacy for the sake of journalism. But what I was not prepared for was how easily my actions could be misinterpreted.

“For most of the experiment, I was, frankly, a boring test subject. It was the middle of the Omicron wave, and the only times I ventured out of our house, which is about 90 minutes from Manhattan, were to drop our daughter off at preschool or go to the grocery store. But one day I had to go into New York City for work — and Todd Heisler, a Times photographer, secretly followed me. Kashmir was sending him live updates of my location.

“Confusion reigned almost immediately. As soon as I arrived in Manhattan, Todd captured me walking — or had I been caught in a potentially compromising position? A friend made light of the situation on Twitter after the article was published, saying it was ‘a nice touch’ that the main picture with the article ‘shows you apparently emerging from a bar at 10 a.m.’ Needless to say, I was not drinking before lunch, but the diner where I had just eaten breakfast had a ‘cocktails’ sign in the window.”

Read more here.