Two related stories in the past week:

Shubham Bose shows how reading a story on the New York Times website involves downloading 49 megabytes and making 422 network requests to, as he describes it, "mine your data" and auction your attention to "dozens" of ad networks in a process "incredibly hostile" to the reader.

Meanwhile Zack Whittacker quotes the FBI director confirming for the first time that his agency buys information about Americans that was collected by corporations online. "It has led to some valuable intelligence for us," the FBI director told Congress.

The business of brokering private data is inherently murky, and no one has, as far as I know, drawn a straight line from a news article to a federal surveillance dossier. But also as far as I know, no one is bothering to try and prevent that from happening, either.

Which is pretty surprising, given that news consumers are being asked to dig deeper into their pockets every year to pay for what they read online. Does anyone actually think they will contentedly pay to be surveilled, once they know it's happening?