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  3. Much as we enjoy the conveniences the Internet brings us, the threat to our

Much as we enjoy the conveniences the Internet brings us, the threat to our

游客2024-11-06  1
问题     Much as we enjoy the conveniences the Internet brings us, the threat to our privacy is getting more and more serious. We should not ignore the danger brought by this violation of our privacy. Read the excerpt carefully and write your response in about 300 words, in which you should:
    1. summarize briefly the different opinions;
    2. give your comment.
    Marks will be awarded for content relevance, content sufficiency, organization and language quality. Failure to follow the above instructions may result in a loss of marks.
    Today, as companies strive to personalize the services and advertisements they provide over the Internet, the surreptitious collection of personal information is rampant. The very idea of privacy is under threat. 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 divulge information about ourselves to corporations, governments or other outsiders.
    This trade-off 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 trade-offs—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.
    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 minor offences.
    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.
    Years ago, 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.
    While Internet companies may be complacent about the erosion of personal privacy, the rest of us should be wary. There are real dangers.
    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 legitimate corporations and researchers, but also to con men and creeps. Criminal syndicates can use stolen information about our identities to commit financial fraud, and stalkers can use locational data to track our whereabouts.
    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.
    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.
    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. 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 vigilant in defending everyone’s right to set that boundary as he or she sees fit.
    Write your response on ANSWER SHEET FOUR.
选项
答案                 Internet Privacy
    Much as we enjoy the conveniences brought by the Internet, we are sometimes unaware of the intrusion of our privacy via the net because many of the things we do online are recorded by data-digging software. This violation of privacy may have serious consequences such as the possibility of the Internet criminal acts, unconscious manipulation of our thoughts based on the profile made by the stolen information left by us and worst of all the devaluation of the concept of privacy. In nature, intrusion into privacy is a crime against our liberty and happiness.
    Despite the lavish feast brought about by the Internet we relish every day, we have to admit that more frequently than ever, we are mired in the pothole of online security being breached and personal data being plundered. Incredibly myriad data about our lives are being harvested from the traces we leave on the Internet. This data-digging, either for the targeted advertisers or malicious cons and creeps, has eroded our privacy.
    One consequence is that our personal data may fall into the wrong hands, who can wantonly use the stolen information to commit crimes of various kinds. Another consequence is that it would be a violation of the privacy which is supposed to be there when we surf the Internet. If whenever we go about our business online, we find someone else looking at our shoulder "electronically" , it would not only be a chilling lesson for our ethics but also the fiercest assault of our liberty. The very idea of free will and free speech ensured by the anonymity of the Internet might evaporate upon data-mining software run by either well-intended or ill-intended individuals or organizations.
    To solve this problem, privacy products should be developed and promoted. But a deeper look at this issue tells us that harsh punishment and moral lessons should be imposed on those data-vultures. Only in this way can the enshrined privacy be fully guaranteed.
解析 本题探讨的是互联网与个人隐私之间的关系。题目要求简要概括所给材料中的观点，并发表白己的评论。在具体行文方面，考生可以开篇点题，简要概括材料中的观点。第二、三段可以提出自己对这一问题的观点，并说明理由。最后一段总结全文，提出建议。
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