2. 外语
  3. Imagine you’re an employer, looking to hire me for a job. You subscribe to a Web site that gives you background information, and

Imagine you’re an employer, looking to hire me for a job. You subscribe to a Web site that gives you background information, and

admin2012-12-01  28
问题     Imagine you’re an employer, looking to hire me for a job. You subscribe to a Web site that gives you background information, and this is what you find. Jessica Rose Bennett, 29, spends 30 hours a week on social-networking sites — while at work. She is an excessive drinker, a drug user, and sexually promiscuous. She swears a lot, and spends way beyond her means shopping online. Her writing ability? Superior. Cost to hire? Cheap.
    In reality, only part of this is true: yes, I like a good bourbon. But drugs? That conies from my reporting projects — and one in particular that took me to a pot farm in California. The promiscuity? My boyfriend of five years would beg to differ on that, but I did once write a story about polyamory. I do spend hours on social-networking sites, but it’s part of my job. And I’m not nearly as cheap to hire as the Web would have you believe. (Take note, future employers!)
    The irony, of course, is that if this were a real job search, none of this would matter — I’d have already lost the job. But this is the kind of information surmisable to anybody with a Web connection and a bit of background data, who wants to take the time to compile it all. For this particular experiment, we asked ReputationDefender, a company that works to keep information like this private, to do a scrub of the Web, with nothing but my (very common) name and e-mail address to go on. Three Silicon Valley engineers, several decades of experience, and access to publicly available databases like Spokeo, Facebook, and LinkedIn (no, they didn’t do any hacking)—and voila. Within 30 minutes, the company had my Social Security number; in two hours, they knew where I lived, my body type, my hometown, and my health status. (Note: this isn’t part of Reputation Defender’s service; they did the search — and accompanying graphic — exclusively for Newsweek, to show how much about a person is out there for the taking.)
    It’s scary stuff, but scarier when you realize it’s the kind of information that credit-card companies and data aggregators are already selling, for pennies, to advertisers every day. Or that it’s the kind of data, as The Wall Street Journal revealed last week, that’s being blasted to third parties when you download certain apps on Facebook. (Under close watch by Congress, Facebook has said it’s working to "dramatically limit" its users’ personal exposure.) "Most people are still under the illusion that when they go online, they’re anonymous," says Nicholas Carr, the author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. "But in reality, every move they make is being collected into a database."
    This, say tech experts, is the credit score of the future — a kind of aggregated ranking for every aspect of your life. It’s an assessment that goes beyond the limits of targeted advertising — you know, those pesky shoe banners that follow a visit to Zappos, made possible by tracking devices we know as "cookies" — by making use of the data in ways that are more personal and, potentially, damaging. Think HMOs, loan applications, romantic partners. Let’s say you’ve been hitting up a burger joint twice a week, and you happen to joke, in a post on Twitter, how all the meat must be wreaking havoc on your cholesterol. Suddenly your health-insurance premiums go up. Now imagine your job is listed on Salary.com; your vacation preferences linked to Orbitz. Think how this could affect your social standing, or your ability to negotiate a raise or apply for a loan. Finally, what if you could know, based on Web history and location tracking, that a prospective mate had a communicable disease. Wouldn’t you pay to find out? "Most of us just don’t realize the potential consequences of this," says Lorrie Cranor, a Web-privacy expert at Carnegie Mellon University.
"Facebook" is cited as an example to
选项 A、illustrate the usefulness of the database collected by websites.
B、assess the efficiency of government supervision over websites.
C、demonstrate the fact of personal information being obtained by websites.
D、show the efforts to protect people’s privacy by websites.
答案C
解析 第四段第二句大意是：就像上周华尔街日报披露的那样，当你下载Facebook上提供的某些应用程序时，就会将信息泄露给第三方。结合文章中心思想，那么Facebook的例证是为了证明网站收集用户个人信息这一事实，所以[C]是答案。虽然第三段第二句后括号中内容大意是，在国会密切关注下，Facebook表示其正在努力“最大限度地”避免用户的个人信息外泄，说明国家和政府意识到这个问题，并开始对网站进行监管，但政府监管并不是文章的重点所在，所以排除[B]。同样，虽然Facebook正在努力“最大限度地”避免用户的个人信息外泄，但[D]也不是文章重点，因而被排除。第四段最后一句虽然提到网民的一举一动都被收入数据库，但文章并未谈及这种数据库的作用，排除[A]。
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