时代周刊 用户如何追究Facebook的责任(1)（在线收听）

HOW USERS CAN HOLD FACEBOOK ACCOUNTABLE

用户如何追究Facebook的责任

By Lisa Eadicicco

文/丽萨·埃迪奇科

It is not easy to protect 1.4 billion people every day.

每天要保护14亿人并不容易。

But if Facebook wants to be the home where all those people share their likes and heartbreaks and plans and politics with acquaintances online,

然而，如果Facebook想成为大家和网友分享喜好、心酸、计划以及讨论政治的港湾，

it had better try a lot harder.

那它还得狠狠地努力才行。

That was the thrust of the news on March 17,

这也正是3月17日新闻的主旨，

when the Observer of London and the New York Times revealed that analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly obtained data from 50 million Facebook accounts.

当日，伦敦的《观察家报》和《纽约时报》披露，分析公司“剑桥分析”采取非正当首段获取了5000万Facebook账户的信息。

The company, which worked with both Senator Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on their 2016 presidential campaigns,

该公司，2016年的总统竞选活动期间曾与参议员特德·克鲁兹和唐纳德·特朗普密切合作，

then attempted to build psychological profiles of potential voters — with the hopes of using them to determine whom to target.

当时是想建立潜在选民的心理资料——希望利用这些资料来确定拉拢对象。

But in this case, unlike other recent privacy breakdowns — like the Equifax data breach that put 145.5 million accounts at risk — thieves or hackers did not steal information.

然而，在这次的情况中，不同于近期的其他隐私事故——比如将1.455亿账户暴露在危险之下的艾奎法克斯数据泄露事件——窃贼或黑客并没有窃取用户们的信息。

The company actually just handed the data over, then didn’t watch where it went.

实际上，该公司只是把数据上交了，之后却没有监管数据去了哪里。

As Facebook itself reported,

正如Facebook自己指出的那样，

Aleksandr Kogan, the academic researcher who first obtained the information through an app he developed,

压力山大·科根，通过自己开发的应用最先获取了那些信息的学术研究员，

did so “in a legitimate way and through proper channels” and violated Facebook’s policies only when he passed it on to Cambridge Analytica.

是“以合法的方式并通过适当的渠道”获取的资料，只是在将信息交给“剑桥分析”后才违反了Facebook的政策。

The social network was also under the impression until recently that the harvested data had been deleted,

直到最近，该社交网络一直以为获得的数据已经删除了，

but the Times says it has viewed a set of it.

但《泰晤士报》表示他们已经看过一组数据了。

Right now, it’s not clear who else can see the data.

目前，还有谁能看到那些数据尚不清楚。

All This has prompted sharp criticism of the company,

这一切都引起了人们对该公司的尖锐批评，

which meticulously tracks its users but failed to keep track of where information about the lives and thinking of those people went.

因为它精心地跟踪用户的数据，却未能跟踪到有关这些人的生活和思考的信息最后去了哪里。

Facebook’s shares were down by 6.8% in the first business day after the reports.

报告发布后的第一个交易日，Facebook的股价下跌了6.8％。

Lawmakers in both the U.S. and Britain, where Cambridge Analytica did similar work ahead of the Brexit referendum,

美国和英国，英国脱欧公投前剑桥分析也做过类似的工作，的立法者们

have demanded testimony from Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg.

纷纷要求Facebook首席执行官马克·扎克伯格出面作证。

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general have reportedly begun investigations.

据报道，美国联邦贸易委员会和州检察长已对此事展开调查。

On the site itself, many users mused, Why are we still here?

在Facebook网站上，许多用户都在思考，为什么我们还在用Facebook？

This all comes at a time when the company reported that it had seen a decrease in daily active users in the U.S. and Canada for the first time — from 185 million to 184 million — in the fourth quarter of 2017.

此事恰逢该公司报告该网站美国和加拿大每日活跃用户数量首次出现了下降——从1.85亿降至1.84亿人——时间为2017年第四季度。