The Times, like many of these organizations, maintains clear internal guidelines about how such data is collected and used. But this control is often more limited than it seems because in many cases, the news organizations that host the trackers don’t know what happens with that information once it is transferred to third parties. Those companies include major platforms like Google and Facebook, smaller companies you’ve never heard of that act as analytics providers and advertising intermediaries, and the individual companies that place individual advertisements. Readers may understandably wonder: What data do these companies have? To whom might they sell it? How might those buyers exploit it?

I ask myself those questions, too, as a publisher and as a person who uses the internet. As a journalist, I deeply believe that society benefits from the type of free-flowing information that overly broad privacy regulations could unintentionally impede. Our reporting often relies on leaks from whistle-blowers, personal communications of government officials obtained through records requests and computer-driven analysis of huge sets of data. But I’m also a person who values his own privacy — I have virtually no presence on social media — and I share the anxiety and mixed feelings that many have about the systematic collection, warehousing and sharing of personal data.

It’s clear that the rapid increase in data collection has resulted in many worthy contributions: creating a more interconnected world, saving users untold amounts of time and money, driving business and innovation and enabling important advances, from identifying public health threats to foiling terrorist attacks. But it’s also increasingly clear those benefits come with costs and trade-offs that society has not really reckoned with. People have little transparency into what is being gathered, where it’s being shared and how it’s being used — to follow their movements, to charge them more for health insurance or to manipulate them with political messages — and even less agency to do anything about it.

Countless companies are wrestling with these trade-offs, many of them doing the best they can within a digital ecosystem they can’t hope to unilaterally reform. The internet doesn’t have to be this way. But change needs to be driven at a societal level — by politicians, leaders of major technology companies and the public at large.

While we’d welcome such change, we’re not waiting for it. The Times is committed to continuing to take steps to increase transparency and protections. And our journalists will do their part to ensure that the public and policymakers are fully informed by covering these issues aggressively, fairly and accurately. Over the coming months, The Privacy Project will feature reporters investigating how digital privacy is being compromised, Op-Ed editors bringing in outside voices to help foster debate and contextualize trade-offs, and Opinion writers calling for solutions. All of us at The Times will be reading closely as well, using their findings to help inform the continuing evolution of our own policies and practices.