时代周刊:国会能控制住大型科技公司吗?(1)（在线收听）

CAN CONGRESS REIN IN BIG TECH?

国会能控制住大型科技公司吗?

Washington has been happy to let high-tech companies police themselves—until now

华盛顿一直乐于让高科技公司自我监督——到现在为止

ABOUT TWO HOURS INTO A SENATE HEARING ON April 10,

4月10日，参议院听证会进行到大约两个小时之后，

Mark Zuckerberg was asked if he would like to take a break.

马克·扎克伯格被问及是否要休息一下。

He was in the midst of a rare spectacle: two powerful committees, with a total of 44 Senators,

当时，他正罕见地被围绕在一大群人中间：两个权威的委员会，总44名参议员，

were holding a joint hearing to grill a single CEO.

正在举行一场联合听证会，盘问这位CEO。

So when Zuckerberg responded by saying he wasn’t tired yet, the packed room broke into laughter.

当扎克伯格回应说他还不累的时候，满屋子的人都哄堂大笑起来。

The levity didn’t last long.

但这种轻松的氛围并没有持续多久。

“What happened here was, in effect, willful blindness,”

“这次的问题实质上是某些人故意视而不见的引起的问题，”

said Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, the next at bat, as he pressed the 33-year-old Facebook founder

针对名为“剑桥分析”的政治营销公司如何在未经用户同意的情况下，获得了将近8700万用户的个人数据这一问题，

on exactly how a political marketing firm called Cambridge Analytica ended up with data from some 87 million users’ proiles without their consent.

接下来发问的康涅狄格州参议员理查德·布卢门撒尔在向这位33岁的Facebook创始人施压时说到。

“It was heedless,” he went on, “and reckless.”

“这种做法不仅轻率，”他接着说，“而且鲁莽。”

In Silicon Valley, heedlessness and recklessness have traditionally been seen as virtues—

“轻率”和“鲁莽”历来是被硅谷人视为美德——

Facebook’s early internal rallying cry was “move fast and break things”—

Facebook早期的内部口号就是“快速行动，打破陈规”——

and necessary precursors for innovation.

视为创新必要的先驱的。

But a long-simmering reality check is coming to a head across the high-tech industry.

然而，一场酝酿已久的现实对这一理念的检验，正在对整个高科技行业产生重大影响。

While privacy concerns and even large-scale data breaches are nothing new,

尽管有关隐私甚至是大规模的数据泄露的问题都早已不是什么新鲜事了，

experts say the fracas at Facebook has brought the dilemma of increasingly powerful technology into better focus.

专家表示，有关Facebook的大吵大闹还是引起了人们对日益强大的技术带来的困境的更多关注。

“Being these networked citizens of the world, it’s kind of a struggle, at times, to say why we care about privacy,”

“作为网络化的世界公民，有时，很难说我们为什么要关心隐私，”

says Urs Gasser, executive director at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.

哈佛大学伯克曼克莱因互联网与社会中心执行董事乌尔斯·加塞说。

“But in this case, there is this element that the data about us is suddenly used to manipulate us in our decisionmaking and somehow mess with our democracy.”

“但这次的问题还有这样的一面：我们的数据突然被用来操纵我们的决策，甚至扰乱起我们的民主了。”

The concerns go beyond social networking.

这类担忧已经不再局限于社交网络的范畴了。

Over two days at two hearings in both chambers,

在两天的参众两院听证会上，

members of Congress aired grievances not just about Zuckerberg’s company but also the ills of Google and Twitter,

国会议员们不仅表达了对扎克伯格公司的不满，也表达了对谷歌和推特存在的问题，

the lack of diversity in the industry and the lack of rural fiber-optic cable.

互联网行业缺乏多样性，农村缺乏光纤等问题的不满。

In calls for closer scrutiny of firms from Apple to Amazon, some see a coming “techlash.”

在呼吁对苹果到亚马逊之类的公司进行更严格的审查的呼声中，有人预见到一场“技术冲击”即将到来。

And by the time he appeared on Capitol Hill, Zuckerberg seemed to have grasped that.

出现在国会山时，扎克伯格似乎就已经明白了这一点。

“As Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying connected,” he said.

“随着Facebook的发展，世界各地的人们都有了一个强大的，用来和朋友保持联系的新工具，”他说。

“But it’s clear now that we didn’t do enough to prevent these tools from being used for harm as well.”

“但很明显，我们在防止这些工具被恶意利用方面做得还不够。”