Interesting, this is a phrase I’ve never heard before. But this is a concept I’ve had to articulate quite a number of times in recent years, as it has been quite pertinent as of late. This’ll be useful shorthand.
I have two of these devices (RM2 and the Paper Pro) and haven’t experienced anything of what you’re describing despite using them extensively for a few years. I would recommend getting in touch with support about that, or trying a factory reset to see if that improves anything.
I've noticed this too and I agree it's unacceptable practice. Journalism in general has become wildly resistant to properly citing their sources (or they simply make their citation as difficult to find as possible through various obfuscation techniques) and this is making independent validation of any information online that much more difficult while further entrenching a culture of "just trust me, bro" on the internet in general. It's a deeply infuriating and destructive practice that needs to die out. At least when I was in school & university, properly citing your sources was everything when it came to writing any sort of report or essay. How the adtech industry managed to quietly undo that standard expectation so thoroughly for the sake of engagement metrics is rather nuts to me.
They shouldn’t even need to access the camera roll at all in the vast majority of cases. The OS should simply pass photos and videos as an input to the app as an explicit user action; the camera roll itself should be a black box as far as the app is concerned.