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

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

游客2023-08-24  29
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] According to the passage, the ultimate goal of Google, Facebook and others is to________.
选项 A、upgrade their service to adapt to customers’ needs
B、ask customers to pay more for their service
C、provide more entertainments for online users
D、persuade users to give up rights on privacy
答案 B
解析 推理判断题。本题考查这些大网络公司的最终目的是什么。由第五段可知，这些公司创造了非常有用或有娱乐性的服务项目，这样人们就会为了享用这些服务而放弃一些隐私。目前他们的诡计是使人们放弃更多隐私，实际上是为了使服务的价格不断提高。由此可推知，他们的最终目的是使服务价格提高，使用户为享用服务而付更多的费用，故B)是本题答案。A)“升级服务以适应消费者的需求"，C)“为在线用户提供更多的娱乐”和D)“说服用户放弃隐私权"，均是对原文意思的曲解，故排除。
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