随着网络的普遍使用与计算机技术的日益发达,与自由权利与人生幸福息息相关的个人隐私也遭受到了前所未有的严重侵蚀。每当你误以为自己在虚拟的网络世界里“来去无影”地自由驰骋时,你的个人信息却正在以你无法想象的详细程度和传播速度被网络识别、记忆、交换、利用。在这个现实与虚拟交错的信息化世界里,难道代表个体自由的个人隐私真的不再重要、无从谈起,并将成为历史的记忆吗?
Today, as companies strive to personalize the services and advertisements they provide over the Internet, the surreptitious1) collection of personal information is rampant2). The very idea of privacy is under threat.
如今,各家公司在因特网上竞相提供个性化的服务和广告,由此造成暗中搜集个人信息的现象变得极其猖獗。个人隐私的主张正在受到威胁。
Most of us view personalization and privacy as desirable things, and we understand that enjoying more of one means giving up some of the other. To have goods, services and promotions tailored to our personal circumstances and desires, we need to divulge3) information about ourselves to corporations, governments or other outsiders.
我们大多数人既想获得个性化的服务,也想保有个人隐私,而我们也都明白,一种权利享受得多一些,另一种权利就会失去一些。所以,为了享受那些根据我们自身情况和需求而量身定制的商品、服务和促销活动,我们需要向公司、政府部门以及其他形形色色的“外人”们透露我们的个人信息。
This tradeoff4) has always been part of our lives as consumers and citizens. But now, thanks to the Net, we’re losing our ability to understand and control those tradeoffs—to choose, consciously and with awareness of the consequences, what information about ourselves we disclose and what we don’t. Incredibly detailed data about our lives are being harvested from online databases without our awareness, much less our approval.
不管是作为消费者,还是作为公民,这种得失权衡一直是我们生活的一部分。然而,现在,由于互联网的存在,我们失去了理解与控制这种权衡的能力——在清醒地意识到后果的前提下选择透露哪些信息、保留哪些信息的能力。有关我们个人生活的详细无比的信息正在从网络数据库中不断被人获取,而我们对此毫不知情,更谈不上允许。
We often assume that we’re anonymous as we go about our business online. As a result, we treat the Net not just as a shopping mall but as a personal diary. Through the sites we visit and the searches we make, we disclose details not only about our jobs, hobbies, families, politics and health, but also about our secrets, fantasies, even our peccadilloes5).
我们常常以为自己在网上的行踪无人知晓,于是我们不仅把网络当做购物商场,还用它来记录私人日记。通过我们访问过的网站、进行过的搜索,我们不仅透露了有关我们工作、嗜好、家庭、政治信仰和健康方面的详细信息,而且还泄露了我们的秘密、幻想,甚至过失。
But our sense of anonymity is largely an illusion. Pretty much everything we do online is recorded, stored in cookies and corporate databases, and connected to our identities, either explicitly through our user names, credit-card numbers and the IP addresses assigned to our computers, or implicitly through our searching, surfing and purchasing histories.
事实上,我们所认为的匿名上网在很大程度上只是我们一厢情愿的幻觉而已。我们在网上的一举一动几乎都会被记录下来,储存在网页cookie和相关机构的数据库中,并能与个人身份相联系,这种联系有时是直接通过我们的用户名、信用卡号码以及分配给电脑的IP地址建立起来的,有时则是间接通过我们的搜索、浏览和购物历史建立起来的。
A few years ago, the computer consultant Tom Owad6) published the results of an experiment that provided a chilling lesson in just how easy it is to extract sensitive personal data from the Net. Mr. Owad wrote a simple piece of software that allowed him to download public wish lists that Amazon.com customers post to catalog7) products that they plan to purchase or would like to receive as gifts. These lists usually include the name of the list’s owner and his or her city and state. Mr. Owad then searched the data for controversial or politically sensitive books and authors. He ended up with maps of the United States showing the locations of people interested in particular books and ideas. Mr. Owad concluded, “Today it is increasingly easy to monitor ideas. And then track them back to people.”
几年前,电脑顾问汤姆·奥瓦德发表了一项实验的结果,这一结果给人们上了令人警醒的一课,因为它向人们展示了从网络获取个人的机密信息有多么得易如反掌。奥瓦德先生编写了一个简单的小程序,利用这一程序,他能够下载到亚马逊网站的客户意愿列表,该列表是网站客户发布的打算购买或者希望作为礼品收到的产品清单,通常包括用户姓名以及用户所居住的城市或州。随后,奥瓦德先生对这些意愿清单的数据信息进行搜索,从中寻找具有争议性和政治上较为敏感的书籍和作者。最终的结果是,他很快就绘制出了若干美国地图,地图上清晰地标明了对这些敏感书籍和观点感兴趣的亚马逊客户都居住在哪里。奥瓦德先生的结论是:“今天,对各种观点进行监视越来越容易,而且轻而易举地就能追踪到支持各种观点的人。”
What Mr. Owad did by hand can increasingly be performed automatically, with data-mining8) software that draws from many sites and databases. In 2006, a team of scholars from the University of Minnesota described how easy it is for data-mining software to create detailed personal profiles of individuals. The software is based on a simple principle: People tend to leave lots of little pieces of information about themselves and their opinions in many different places on the Web. By identifying correspondences among the data, sophisticated algorithms can identify individuals with extraordinary precision. And it’s not a big leap from there to discovering the people’s names.
而以上奥瓦德先生靠手工所做的这一切,如今已能够越来越多地靠软件自动完成,因为现在有一种数据挖掘软件,能够从众多网站和数据库中自动提取资料。2006年,明尼苏达大学的一个学术团队描述了数据挖掘软件是如何轻易创建出详细的个人档案材料的。此类软件基于一个简单的原理而设计:人们通常会在很多不同的网站留下许多不起眼的个人信息和个人观点。而先进、复杂的算法能够识别出这些数据信息间的相似点,从而精准无误地辨别出每一个个体。如果已经做到这一步,那么在此基础上找到每个个体的姓名也就并非难事了。
“You have zero privacy.” Scott McNealy9) remarked back in 1999, when he was chief executive of Sun Microsystems. While Internet companies may be complacent10) about the erosion11) of personal privacy, the rest of us should be wary12). There are real dangers.
“你们毫无隐私可言。” 斯科特·麦克尼利早在1999年就曾这样断言,其时他担任太阳微系统公司的总裁。网络公司也许会对能够侵犯个人隐私而沾沾自喜,但我们普通人可就要小心了。这里存在着真正的危险。
First and most obvious is the possibility that our personal data will fall into the wrong hands. Powerful data-mining tools are available not only to legitimate13) corporations and researchers, but also to con men and creeps. Criminal syndicates14) can use purloined15) information about our identities to commit financial fraud, and stalkers16) can use locational data to track our whereabouts.
第一种也是最显而易见的风险是个人资料可能会落到别有用心者手里。功能强大的数据挖掘工具不仅能为合法机构和研究者所获取,也能为坑蒙拐骗之徒所获取。犯罪集团可能会利用窃取得来的身份信息对我们进行经济诈骗,暗中跟踪者也可能会利用定位数据来跟踪我们的行踪。
The first line of defense is, of course, common sense. We need to take personal responsibility for the information we share whenever we log on. But no amount of17) caution will protect us from the dispersal of information collected without our knowledge. If we’re not aware of what data about us are available online, and how they’re being used and exchanged, it can be difficult to guard against abuses.
第一道保护个人隐私的防线当然是常识。无论何时上网,我们都需要对自己共享的信息负责。但是,如果我们的个人信息是在我们毫不知情的情况下被搜集的,那么无论我们多么小心,都无法阻止其被传播出去。如果我们根本就意识不到关于自身的哪些信息可以从网上获取,也不知道这些信息将被用于何种用途,又以何种方式被交换,那么要想提防其不被非法滥用,将非常困难。
A second danger is the possibility that personal information may be used to influence our behavior and even our thoughts in ways that are invisible to us. Personalization’s evil twin is manipulation. As mathematicians and marketers refine data-mining algorithms, they gain more precise ways to predict people’s behavior as well as how they’ll react when they’re presented with online ads and other digital stimuli.
第二种风险是个人信息有可能被用来以隐秘的方式影响我们的行为,甚至思想。“个性化服务”有一个邪恶的孪生兄弟,那就是“操纵”。数学家和营销人员们在不断精心完善着用于数据挖掘方面的算法,随之而来的结果是他们能够更加精确得预测出人们的行为,以及面对网络广告和其他数字时代的激励手段时人们的反应。
As marketing pitches and product offerings become more tightly tied to our past patterns of behavior, they become more powerful as triggers of future behavior. Already, advertisers are able to infer extremely personal details about people by monitoring their Web-browsing habits. They can then use that knowledge to create ad campaigns customized to particular individuals. The line between personalization and manipulation is a fuzzy one, but one thing is certain: We can never know if the line has been crossed if we’re unaware of what companies know about us.
现在,市场营销手段和产品供应都与我们已有的消费行为模式绑定在一起,而随着这种绑定关系越来越紧密,它们对我们将来的消费行为也产生了越来越强大的影响力。通过监控人们的网络浏览习惯,广告商们已经能够推断出他们极其隐秘的个人信息了。利用这些信息,他们能够“量体裁衣”,创作出针对特定个体的广告宣传。个性化服务和操纵之间的界限是模糊的,但有一点是肯定的:如果不知道网络公司掌握了我们的哪些信息,我们就永远不会知道它们是否超越了那条界限。
Safeguarding privacy online isn’t particularly hard. It requires that software makers and site operators assume that people want to keep their information private. Privacy settings should be on by default and easy to modify. And when companies track our behavior or use personal details to tailor messages, they should provide an easy way for us to see what they’re doing.
保护网络隐私其实并非难以办到。它需要编程人员和网站经营者明白,人们希望对个人信息保密。在默认状态下,隐私设置应该是开启的,并且应该易于更改。当网络公司跟踪我们的网上行踪或者利用个人信息来定制网络内容时,他们应当提供简便的途径,让我们知道他们在干什么。
The greatest danger posed by the continuing erosion of personal privacy is that it may lead us as a society to devalue the concept of privacy, to see it as outdated and unimportant. That would be a tragedy. Privacy is not just a screen we hide behind when we do something naughty or embarrassing; privacy is intrinsic to the concept of liberty. When we feel that we’re always being watched, we begin to lose our sense of self-reliance and free will and, along with it, our individuality.
持续侵犯个人隐私所带来的最大风险在于它可能会使整个社会轻视个人隐私的价值所在,将隐私看做是某种过时而无关紧要的东西。这将是一场悲剧。隐私并不仅仅是一道可供躲藏的屏风,用来遮蔽我们所做的有失大雅或者尴尬难堪之事;隐私和自由的理念有着本质的联系。我们如果时时刻刻都感到自己受到监视,便会失去独立感和自由意志,而与此同时失去的,还有个人独有的特性。
Privacy is not only essential to life and liberty; it’s essential to the pursuit of happiness, in the broadest and deepest sense. We human beings are not just social creatures; we’re also private creatures. What we don’t share is as important as what we do share. The way that we choose to define the boundary between our public self and our private self will vary greatly from person to person, which is exactly why it’s so important to be ever vigilant18) in defending everyone’s right to set that boundary as he or she sees fit.
个人隐私不仅对生命和自由来说是重要的,从最广泛和最深刻的意义上来说,它对追求幸福也是至关重要的。我们人类不仅仅是社会的动物,我们也是隐私的动物。我们不愿分享的东西和我们愿意分享的东西同等重要。对于公共场合中的自我和私下里的自我,每个人划定的界限都是大不相同的,正因为如此,我们才要时刻保持警惕,来捍卫自己的权利,划定自己所认为的合理的隐私界限——这一点至关重要。
1. surreptitious [7sQrEp5tIFEs] adj. 暗中的,私下的,秘密的
2. rampant [5rAmpEnt] adj. 猖獗的,蔓生的
3. divulge [daI5vQldV] vt. 泄露,暴露
4. tradeoff [5treIdC:f] n. (公平)交易,权衡,折衷
5. peccadillo [pekE5dIlEu] n. 轻罪,小过失
6. Tom Owad:汤姆·奥瓦德,美国Macintosh咨询师,网站Applefritter的创建者与编辑,著有《Apple I复制品之制作:返回车库》(Apple I Replica Creation: Back to the Garage)。
7. catalog [5kAtElC^] vt. 列目录
8. data-mining:数据挖掘。所谓数据挖掘,就是从大量的、不完全的、有噪声的、模糊的、随机的实际应用数据中,提取隐含在其中的、人们事先不知道的但又是潜在有用信息和知识的过程。
9. Scott McNealy:斯科特·麦克尼利(1954~),太阳微系统公司(Sun Microsystem)的创始人之一,1984~2006年担任该公司首席执行官,之后一直担任公司董事长。
10. complacent [kEm5pleIsnt] adj. 自满的,得意的
11. erosion [I5rEuVEn] n. 侵蚀
12. wary [5weErI] adj. 谨慎的,警惕的
13. legitimate [lI5dVItImIt] adj. 合法的,合理的
14. criminal syndicate:犯罪集团。syndicate [5sIndIkIt] n. 辛迪加(某些人或工商企业的联合组织)
15. purloin [pE:5lCIn] vt. 偷窃,盗取
16. stalker [5stC:kE] n. 暗中追踪者
17. no amount of:怎么(再多)也……不
18. vigilant [5vIdVIlEnt] adj. 警惕的,警觉的