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

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

游客2024-03-11  78
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 them 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, 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" control (“渐进式”控制，指允许不同使用 者存取不同内容的应用) 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 (花言巧语) 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] What does the author think of some companies’ strategies on privacy?
选项 A、They intrude people’s privacy under tricky disguise.
B、They endeavor to change people’s ideas on privacy.
C、They frighten people to give up some privacy.
D、They take serious responsibility for people’s privacy.
答案 A
解析
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