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  3. Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as morally exceptional. When Google went public in 2004, the company’s founders penned a

Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as morally exceptional. When Google went public in 2004, the company’s founders penned a

admin2014-10-24  59
问题     Silicon Valley likes to think of itself as morally exceptional. When Google went public in 2004, the company’s founders penned a letter to prospective shareholders that has become the Internet industry’s version of the Magna Carta. In it, they pledged that Google was "not a conventional company" but one focused on "making the world a better place. "
    Though Silicon Valley’s newest billionaires may anoint themselves the saints of American capitalism, they’re beginning to resemble something else entirely: robber barons. Like their predecessors in railroads, steel, banking, and oil a century ago, Silicon Valley’s new entrepreneurs are harnessing technology to make the world more efficient. But along the way, that process is bringing great economic and labor dislocation, as well as an unequal share of the spoils.
    Take Apple’s manufacturing practices inChina. By systematically outsourcing the assembly of iPhones and other gadgets to contract manufacturers like China’s Foxconn, Apple has reduced its overall cost of production and increased profit margins for shareholders. That’s neither unique nor necessarily evil. It’s a practice regularly adopted by all kinds of industries. But establishing an arm’s-length commercial relationship does not absolve a company from moral responsibility for the way its chosen partners treat workers. Labor issues at Foxconn have attracted bad press for some time. It was not until that negative publicity on New York Times last year that Apple took more meaningful action, allowing the Fair Labor Association to conduct special audits of its suppliers’ factories in China.
    A bigger battle remains to be fought on the privacy front, where Silicon Valley’s misdemeanors are even more upsetting. Pushing the boundaries of what is generally considered acceptable, even decent, when it comes to exploiting personal information is a daily sport in the online world. That’s because a tweak here or there to the privacy settings of a social network or a tiny change to the code on a mobile application can mean a world of difference in the value of information an advertiser can access about a usually unaware user. Perhaps swayed by Silicon Valley’s altruistic spin or slow to catch up with its rapid growth, Washington has, up to now, largely left the industry to regulate itself on privacy. That’s clearly not working. Hardly a day passes without some new revelation of an Internet or mobile company stepping a byte too far into the private business of its customers.
    The original robber barons had decent intentions when they built railroads to connect America’s emerging cities and drilled oil wells that fueled the nation’s growth, but their empires still needed to be regulated, reined in, and in some cases broken up by vigilant watchdogs. Lofty words and ideals are fine for motivating employees and even for spurring sales, but they can also serve as cover for motives that clash with the broader interests of consumers and society. We need more than fancy promises to ensure that the rise of the Silicon Valley engineer is good for the world.
From Paragraph 4, we know that the IT companies usually access the users’ private information by
选项 A、hacking users’ computers and stealing useful information
B、requiring real personal information on social networks
C、making unnoticeable modifications to technical settings
D、inserting advertisement into websites users browse
答案C
解析 第四段中提到，互联网公司侵略用户信息的惯用伎俩是把通常认为是可接受的，甚至是有分寸的边界线向前推进。“Pushing the boundaries of what is generally considered acceptable，even decent，when it comes to exploiting personal information is a daily sport in the online world．”这句话非常抽象，作者在后面一句话中说得更加明白，“只需稍微在社交网络的隐私设置中动一点手脚，或对移动应用的代码略加变动就足以让广告人手中的用户信息发生天翻地覆的变化，而用户对这一切往往是蒙在鼓里毫不知情的”。因此，互联网公司现在获取用户信息的手段往往非常隐蔽，而不是[A]和[B]两个选项所说的那么明显，黑客人侵，盗取信息；或者直接要求客户提供信息，而应该是[C]选项所说的，对技术设置稍加修改，从而以客户无法察觉的方式获取信息。[D]选项利用advertisement一词设置干扰，原文提到了advertiser一词，但是和这里提到的在用户浏览过的网页上加载广告毫无关系。
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