来源：译言

作者：John Gapper

马克•扎克伯格创造了社交平台脸书，然而互联网上用户数据泄露的问题让这位年轻的CEO骤然成为众矢之的。近日，扎克伯格来到华盛顿国会大厦参加听证会，就脸书如何处理用户数据和隐私问题接受参议。

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扎克伯格的脸书是如何失控的

原文

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In Walt Disney’s Fantasia, the apprentice Mickey Mouse bashfully hands back the sorcerer’s hat after failing to stop a troupe of magic broomsticks from causing a flood.

在华特•迪士尼的《幻想曲》中，魔法师的学徒“米老鼠”在未能阻止一群被施了魔法的扫把引发洪水后，扭捏地把魔法帽还给了魔法师。

Mark Zuckerberg made his own bow to the US Congress last Tuesday by apologising for the havoc that he has unleashed at Facebook.

上周二，马克•扎克伯格在美国国会也为他在脸书造成的烂摊子道歉。

With greater effort and honesty, Facebook can fix the laxity with which it has handled personal data. The Cambridge Analytica scandal showed that it was far too loose in allowing people and organisations to plug into its “social graph” and extract data about millions of users. It has already tightened its data controls and must tighten them more, but the task is achievable.

通过采取更多措施和拿出更诚恳的态度，脸书可以解决它处理个人数据不严谨的问题。剑桥分析丑闻表明，脸书允许个人和机构接入脸书的“社交图谱”并提取数以百万计用户的个人信息，是极其严重的疏漏。脸书已经收紧了对数据的控制，但还须加大力度，不过该任务是可以完成的。

Facebook is to try to make privacy settings clearer by creating a hub where users can examine the data they are sharing, in its latest move to address the scandal that has wiped billions of dollars off its market value.

脸书试图通过创建一个用户可以查看其共享数据的枢纽，使隐私设置更加清晰，这是该公司应对导致其巨额市值蒸发的数据泄露丑闻的最新举措。

The world’s largest social network said the settings — including which third-party developers were permitted to access a users’ data — would be centralised, pulling together information that was at present distributed around 20 pages within the platform.

这个世界上最大的社交网络表示，这些设置（包括那些允许第三方开发者访问用户数据的设置）将被集中起来，把目前分布在平台内约20个页面的信息汇集到一起。

Rob Sherman, deputy chief privacy officer for Facebook, said the changes to make privacy controls “more prominent” were being worked on before the revelations that the data of up to 50m users were leaked to Cambridge Analytica, a data analysis firm that worked for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. He added: “The thing that has been very clear over the past week is that we’ve lost trust and need to work on regaining it.”

脸书副首席隐私官罗布•谢尔曼表示，数据泄露消息爆出前，公司已经在着手进行调整，使隐私控制“占据更加突出的地位”。之前媒体爆料称，多达5000万用户的数据被泄露给唐纳德•特朗普竞选团队所聘请的数据分析公司剑桥分析。他补充说：“过去一周非常明显的一点是，我们失去了信任，需要努力重新赢得信任。”

Facebook will also make it easier for users to see all the data that the company holds on them, allowing individuals to explore them by category rather than via a data dump using its old download tool. The new tool could make it easier for users to take their data to a rival, a process that will be required under the EU’s General Data Protection Rules that come into force in May.

脸书允许个人按类别浏览数据，而不是通过旧的下载工具一下子下载大量数据，让用户更容易看到公司持有的有关他们的所有数据。新工具可能让用户更容易将他们的数据带到竞争对手那里，但这个过程是欧盟《一般数据保护条例》所要求的，该条例将于5月生效。

“It is one thing to read a data policy that explains general practices,” Mr Sherman said. “It is very different seeing your own data and being able to control it.” Facebook is under pressure from politicians and regulators over data privacy. John Edwards, the New Zealand privacy commissioner, yesterday became the latest to criticise the company, saying it had breached the country’s privacy laws. Facebook has denied the claim.

“阅读一份解释一般性做法的数据隐私保护政策是一回事，” 谢尔曼说，“看到你自己的数据并能够控制它，又是非常不同的另一回事。”在数据隐私问题上，脸书面临政界人士和监管机构的压力。新西兰隐私专员约翰•爱德华兹昨日成为最新一位批评该公司的人，他表示，脸书违反了该国的隐私权法。然而脸书对此予以否认。

The crisis has pushed some Facebook users, including Mr Edwards, to delete their accounts. Others have downloaded their data to understand exactly what the company knows about them. Yesterday’s announcement follows changes announced by Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive, which largely focused on reducing the amount of data that third-party apps could collect.

这场危机促使包括爱德华兹在内的一些脸书用户删除了他们的账户。还有一些人下载了他们的数据，以了解公司究竟掌握了他们的多少信息。昨日声明发布之前，首席执行官马克•扎克伯格宣布了一些调整，重点是减少第三方软件可以收集的数据量。

Some privacy experts said Facebook would need to go much further. Jonathan Kewley of law firm Clifford Chance’s technology group said: “There will need to be further steps and more radical steps. New ways will have to be considered beyond a platform which aggregates all the information they control.”

一些隐私专家表示脸书将需要走得更远。高伟绅律师事务所科技业务部门的律师乔纳森•科利表示：“需要采取进一步且更加到位的措施。必须考虑新的方式，而不只是一个把他们控制的所有信息都汇集起来的平台。

But other things cannot be fixed because they are beyond Mr Zuckerberg’s control, lost in myriad encounters among Facebook’s 2bn users. The technical term is emergence, the powerful and unpredictable outcome of millions of users interacting freely with others. Anything from joke videos to fake news can spread like a virus, changing how people feel and act.

但仍然有很多其他问题无法解决，因为这些问题已经不在扎克伯格可控制的范围内，而是散落于脸书的20亿用户无数的交集中。准确地说是“自然生长”，即无数用户自由互动所带来的强大而不可预测的后果。无论是搞笑视频、还是虚假新闻，一切都可能像病毒一样传播，改变着人们的想法和行动。

Mr Zuckerberg has been subdued by witnessing his creation cause chaos. Facebook was tapped by anti-Rohingya Buddhists in Myanmar and Russian fake news factories. No higher authority holds the solution. The EU and the US may impose stricter rules on social networks, but politicians and regulators have no deeper insight into Facebook’s workings than its founder.

扎克伯格目睹了他的作品所造成的混乱却束手无策。脸书被反罗兴亚人的缅甸佛教徒和俄罗斯的假新闻制造厂所利用。当局也没有解决方案。欧盟和美国可能会对社交网络执行更严格的监管规则，但政客和监管者对脸书运作方式的了解并不比其创始人更深。

Facebook increasingly talks of trying to limit the amount of passive consumption by users, from reading news (fake and otherwise) to watching videos. Instead, it wants to nudge them back to the kind of interactions with which it started — “to stay connected to the people they love, make their voices heard, and build communities and businesses”, Mr Zuckerberg says.

脸书开始越来越多地讨论起试图限制用户的被动摄入——从阅读新闻（假新闻以及真新闻）到观看视频。相反，它希望促使用户重新像脸书创建之初那样互动——“与他们喜欢的人保持联系，发出自己的声音，并建立社区和企业，”扎克伯格表示。

That may be prudent, but it does not get to the heart of the matter: Facebook grew by intentionally mixing up what Mark Granovetter, the US sociologist, called “strong ties” with weak ones. The former are close relationships among families, friends and colleagues; the latter are links to distant acquaintances and people in other communities. On Facebook, all “friends” are equal.

这可能是经过深思熟虑之举，但它并没有触及问题的核心：脸书过去的发展是通过有意识地把美国社会学家马克•格拉诺维特所说的“强纽带”与弱纽带混在一起实现的。前者是家人、朋友和同事之间亲近的关系；后者是与一般熟人和其他社区的人之间的联系。在脸书上，所有的“朋友”都是平等的。

Facebook’s size makes it more weakly tied than social networks that focus on smaller communities. One analysis of 957,000 Facebook users and 59m connections (gathered before it limited data scraping) found that “most connections are weak . . . with few contacts and infrequent interactions”. That made it “a powerful way to transfer information across large social distances and to wide segments”.

脸书的规模使得它比其他专注于中小型社区的社交网络更加偏向于弱纽带。一项研究了95.7万用户及其5900万个联系人（在脸书限制数据抓取之前收集的数据）的分析发现，“大多数联系人属于弱纽带 ……联系很少、互动也不频繁”。这使得脸书成为了“跨越广阔社会距离和向大量领域传递信息的有力方式”。

Hundreds of millions of weak ties also make it a powerful way to wield influence. Studies show that people’s mood, behaviour, and even weight are affected by others who are fairly weakly connected in a social network — Profs Christakis and Fowler refer to the “three degrees of influence” that friends of friends of friends can invisibly exert.

大量的弱纽带也使脸书成为了施展影响力的有力途径。多项研究表明，人们的情绪、行为、甚至体重都会受到社交网络中联系相对较弱的熟人的影响——克里斯塔基斯和福勒教授提到你的朋友的朋友的朋友可以在无形中发挥的“三维度影响力”。

This is the trouble with Facebook’s elision of families and acquaintances, of strong and weak ties. The latter can make users happy or depressed; can help them to lose weight or gain it; can deliver insight or misinformation. Good and ill both multiply across its emergent, disobedient network.

这是脸书把强纽带的家人和弱纽带的一般熟人混在一起所面临的问题。后者可以影响用户的心情、可以促使他们减肥或者增重、可以向他们传递真知灼见或错误信息。在脸书自然生长且不服管理的庞大网络中，善意和恶意的效果都被数倍放大。

The sorcerer cleaned up Mickey’s mess but Mr Zuckerberg has not yet handed in his wizard’s hat. “It’s not enough to connect people, we have to make sure those connections are positive,” he told members of Congress on Tuesday. That is a fine pledge, but it would take magic to fulfil it.

魔法师收拾了米老鼠的烂摊子，但扎克伯格目前还没有交出他的魔法帽。周二，他对国会议员说：“仅仅把用户连接起来还不够，我们必须确保这些连接发挥积极作用。”誓言虽然美好，但他得有魔法才能实现。