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Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking feature

游客2023-08-24  24
问题     Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking features to its popular Gmail system. The service is called Buzz, and within hours of its release, people were howling about privacy issues—because, in its original form, Buzz showed everyone the list of people you e-mail most frequently. Even people who weren’t cheating on their spouses or secretly applying for new jobs found this a little unnerving.
    Google backtracked and changed the software, and apologized for the misstep, claiming that, it just never occurred to us that people might get upset. "The public reaction was something we did not anticipate. But we’ve reacted very quickly to people’s unhappiness," says Bradley Horowitz, the vice president for product management at Google.
    Same goes for Facebook. In December, Facebook rolled out a new set of privacy settings. A spokesman says the move was intended to "empower people" by giving them more "granular(精细的)" control over their personal information. But many viewed the changes as a sneaky attempt to push members to expose more information about themselves—partly because its default settings had lots of data, like your photo, city, gender, and information about your family and relationships, set up to be shared with everyone on the Internet.(Sure, you could change those settings, but it was still creepy.)Facebook’s spokesman says the open settings reflect "shifting social norms around privacy. " Five years after Facebook was founded, he says, "we’ve noticed that people are not only sharing more information but also are becoming more comfortable about sharing more information with more people. " Nevertheless, the changes prompted 10 consumer groups to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission.
    What’s happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It’s what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.
    The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they’ve created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.
    These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of "monetizing" our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the "social norm," as Facebook puts it—so that what we’re giving up doesn’t seem so valuable. Then they must gain our trust. Thus each new erosion of privacy comes delivered, paradoxically, with rhetoric(华丽的词藻)about how Company X really cares about privacy. I’m not sure whether Orwell would be appalled or impressed. And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley? [br] How does Facebook evaluate people’s tolerance on private information sharing?
选项 A、People can tolerate the private information sharing within the social norms.
B、People are still too conservative to share their private information.
C、People tend to keep up with the change of social norms on privacy.
D、People have tolerated well when their private information has been shared.
答案 C
解析 推理判断题。由第三段可知，脸谱网推出一套新隐私设置，其发言人对此举的评价是这种开放式设置反映了“与隐私相关的社会标准的改变"，而后进一步解释说脸谱网注意到，自其创立五年以来，人们不仅分享信息而且现在越来越愿意与更多的人分享更多的信息。由此可推知，脸谱网认为人们的观念趋于跟上社会隐私观念的变化，故C)为本题答案。A)“人们能在社会规范内容忍私人信息被分享”，是对原文的曲解，故排除；B)“人们仍然太过保守而不愿分享信息’’，与原文观点相反，故排除；D)“人们对其信息被分享已经能很好地容忍”，是对原文的曲解，故排除。
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