小心Facebook泄露你的隐私

Bobbi Duncan desperately wanted her father not to know she is lesbian. Facebook told him anyway.

博比·邓肯（Bobbi Duncan）千方百计不让父亲知道自己是一名同性恋者，然而Facebook还是让他父亲知道了此事。

One evening last fall, the president of the Queer Chorus, a choir group she had recently joined, inadvertently exposed Ms. Duncan's sexuality to her nearly 200 Facebook friends, including her father, by adding her to a Facebook Inc. discussion group. That night, Ms. Duncan's father left vitriolic messages on her phone, demanding she renounce same-sex relationships, she says, and threatening to sever family ties.

去年秋天的一个晚上，邓肯不久前刚刚加入的一个名为Queer Chorus的合唱团团长把她加进Facebook上的一个讨论组，不小心把邓肯的性取向暴露给了她的近200名Facebook好友，其中包括她的父亲。邓肯说，当晚，她父亲给她发送了措辞严厉的电话留言，要求她放弃同性关系，并威胁断绝家庭关系。

The 22-year-old cried all night on a friend's couch. 'I felt like someone had hit me in the stomach with a bat,' she says.

22岁的邓肯在朋友的沙发椅上哭了整整一夜。她说，“我感觉好像有人用球棒猛击了我的肚子。

Soon, she learned that another choir member, Taylor McCormick, had been outed the very same way, upsetting his world as well.

很快，她得知合唱团里另一名叫泰勒·麦科米克（Taylor McCormick）的团员也以完全相同的方式暴露了同性恋的身份，他的世界也变成一团乱麻。

The president of the chorus, a student organization at the University of Texas campus here, had added Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick to the choir's Facebook group. The president didn't know the software would automatically tell their Facebook friends that they were now members of the chorus.

这个合唱团是德克萨斯大学（University of Texas）校园里的一个学生组织，团长把邓肯和麦科米克加进了合唱团的Facebook群。团长所不知的是软件会自动告知他们的Facebook好友他们现在是该合唱团的成员。

The two students were casualties of a privacy loophole on Facebook -- the fact that anyone can be added to a group by a friend without their approval. As a result, the two lost control over their secrets, even though both were sophisticated users who had attempted to use Facebook's privacy settings to shield some of their activities from their parents.

这两名学生成了Facebook隐私漏洞的受害者──任何人在未征得同意的情况下就可以被好友添加进一个群。结果，两人都失去了对自己秘密的控制，尽管他们俩都是熟手，都试图利用Facebook的隐私设置来避免让父母知道自己的活动。

'Our hearts go out to these young people,' says Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes. 'Their unfortunate experience reminds us that we must continue our work to empower and educate users about our robust privacy controls.'

Facebook发言人安德鲁·诺伊斯（Andrew Noyes）说，“我们内心对这些年轻人充满同情，他们的不幸遭遇提醒我们，我们必须继续努力向用户授权并指导用户使用我们稳固的隐私控制系统。

In the era of social networks like Facebook and Google Inc.'s Google+, companies that catalog people's activities for a profit routinely share, store and broadcast everyday details of people's lives. This creates a challenge for individuals navigating the personal-data economy: how to keep anything private in an era when it is difficult to predict where your information will end up.

在Facebook和谷歌公司（Google Inc.）的Google+这样的社交网络兴起的时代，靠登载人们的活动来盈利的公司通常会将人们日常生活中的细节拿出来分享、储存和广播。这就对那些从事个人资料管理的人提出了挑战：在一个很难预测你的资料信息会流向何方的年代如何保护隐私。

Many people have been stung by accidentally revealing secrets online that were easier kept in the past. In Quebec, Canada, in 2010, Nathalie Blanchard lost her disability-insurance benefits for depression after she posted photos on Facebook showing her having fun at the beach and at a nightclub with male exotic dancers. After seeing the photos, her insurer, Manulife Financial, hired a private investigator and asked a doctor to re-evaluate her diagnosis, according to Ms. Blanchard's lawyer.

很多人都曾经历过网络意外泄露秘密所带来的痛苦，而在过去保守这些秘密却比较容易。2010年，加拿大魁北克省的娜塔莉·布朗夏尔（Nathalie Blanchard）把她在海边和在一个脱衣舞男夜总会玩乐的照片贴到Facebook上之后失去了因抑郁症而申报的伤残保险赔偿金。据布朗夏尔的律师说，她投保的宏利金融公司（Manulife Financial）在看到那些照片以后雇佣了私家侦探，并请了医生对她的医疗诊断结果进行重新评估。

Ms. Blanchard didn't realize her photos were visible to the public, according to the lawyer, who added that depressed people often try to disguise their illness to family and friends. Ms. Blanchard sued to have her benefits reinstated. The matter was settled out of court.

律师说布朗夏尔不知道她的照片公众是看得见的。律师还说抑郁症患者经常试图向家人和朋友掩盖自己的病情。布朗夏尔提起诉讼，要求恢复赔偿。这件事最后达成了庭外和解。

A Manulife spokeswoman declined to discuss the case, saying 'we would not deny or terminate a valid claim solely based on information published on websites such as Facebook.'

宏利金融公司的发言人拒绝讨论这个案子，声称“我们不会仅仅根据Facebook这样的网站上发布的信息就拒绝或终止一桩有效的索赔案。

Losing control online is more than a technology problem -- it's a sociological turning point. For much of human history, personal information spread slowly, person-to-person if at all.

网络上的信息失控不仅仅是一个技术问题──它也是一个社会学意义上的转折点。在人类历史上很长一段时间里，个人信息传播的速度很慢，真要传播起来的话，也是以面对面的方式进行的。

The Facebook era, however, makes it possible to disclose private matters to wide populations, intentionally or not. Personal worlds that previously could be partitioned -- work, family, friendships, matters of sexuality -- become harder to keep apart. One solution, staying off Facebook, has become harder to do as it reaches a billion people around the world.

然而，Facebook时代让私事在大庭广众面前公开成为了可能，不管是有意还是无意的。以前可以割裂开的个人世界──工作、家庭、友情、性事──现在很难分隔开来。唯一的解决方案就是远离Facebook，但这也变得越发困难了，因为Facebook在全世界的用户达到了10亿。

Facebook is committed to the principle of one identity for its users. It has shut down accounts of people who use pseudonyms and multiple accounts, including those of dissidents and protesters in China and Egypt. The company says its commitment to 'real names' makes the site safer for users. It is also at the core of the service they sell to advertisers, namely, access to the real you.

Facebook坚持一名用户一个身份的原则，关闭了使用假名注册和拥有多个账号的用户账户，包括在中国和埃及的那些持不同政见者和异议人士。Facebook公司说它坚持的“实名制使该网站的用户更安全。这也是他们向广告商推销的服务核心，也就是说，广告商可以找到真正的你。

Closeted gays and lesbians face particular challenges in controlling their images online, given that friends, family and enemies have the ability to expose them.

未出柜的男女同性恋者在控制自己的网上形象方面面临特别的挑战，因为朋友、家人和仇人能够将他们的身份曝光。

In Austin, Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick, 21, deliberately tried to stay in the closet with their parents, even as they stepped out on campus. Ms. Duncan's parents home-schooled her and raised her in Newton, N.C., where the family attended a fundamentalist church. Now a linguistics student, she told her best friend in the summer of 2011 that she might be gay.

在奥斯丁（Austin），虽然邓肯和21岁的麦科米克在校园里已经出柜，但他们还是刻意努力不让自己的父母知道。邓肯家在北卡罗来纳州牛顿市（Newton），她在那里长大，在家里接受了小学中学教育，全家人都加入了当地的一个原教旨基督教派。邓肯现在是一名学习语言学的学生，她在2011年夏天告诉她要好的朋友她可能是同性恋。

As she struggled with her sexuality, she adjusted her Facebook privacy settings to hide any hint of it from her father, whom she had helped sign up for Facebook. 'Once I had my Facebook settings set, I knew -- or thought I knew -- there wasn't any problem,' she says.

就在邓肯为自己的性取向问题苦苦挣扎的时候，她重新调整了在Facebook上的隐私设置，不让她父亲发现一点蛛丝马迹。她曾经帮助他父亲在Facebook上注册。她说，“我确信──或者说我原以为自己可以确信──一旦我把Facebook设置里的参数设定好了，就不会出现任何问题了。

Mr. McCormick, studying to become a pharmacist, came out in July 2011 to his mother in his hometown of Blanco, Texas, but not to his father, whom Mr. McCormick describes as a member of a conservative church that teaches homosexuality is sin.

目前正在学习成为一名药剂师的麦科米克2011年7月在德克萨斯州的家乡布兰科（Blanco）向母亲坦白了他是同性恋，但是没有告诉他的父亲。麦科米克说他父亲是一个保守教派的信徒，这个教派宣扬同性恋是罪恶。

He set Facebook controls for what he calls a 'privacy lockdown' on posts that his father, in San Antonio, could see. 'We have the one big secret when we're young,' he says. 'I knew not everyone was going to be accepting.'

他在Facebook上对他称之为“隐私锁定的功能进行了设置，这样可以控制哪些帖子可以给远在圣安东尼奥（San Antonio）的父亲见到。他说，“我们年轻的时候都有这样的大秘密，我知道不是每个人都会接受的。

UT Austin was more accepting. As many university campuses have for years, it offered a safe space for young people to come out without parents knowing. Last fall, Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick attended the first rehearsal for the Queer Chorus, a group for gay, lesbian and transgender students and their allies.

德州大学奥斯丁分校更容易接纳同性恋。就像很多大学校园多年来所做的那样，它为年轻人出柜提供了安全的空间，父母则全然不知。去年秋天，邓肯和麦科米克参加了Queer Chorus合唱团的第一次排练，合唱团由一群男、女同性恋者、变性人以及他们的支持者组成。

'This is a great place to find yourself as a queer person,' says the chorus's then-president, Christopher Acosta. The group is known for renditions of pop songs in which it sometimes changes the gender of pronouns. Ms. Duncan agreed to play piano and sing alto. Mr. McCormick, who has a slight frame, surprised the chorus with his deep bass.

时任合唱团团长的克里斯托弗·阿科斯塔（Christopher Acosta）说，“这是一个发现自己是异类的理想之地。这个合唱团演唱各类流行歌曲，有时会改变歌曲中代词的性别。邓肯同意弹钢琴并唱女低音声部。麦科米克身材瘦弱，但他有着让合唱团意想不到的深沉的男低音。

At the rehearsal, on Sept. 8, Mr. Acosta asked if any members weren't on the chorus's Facebook group, where rehearsals would be planned. Mr. McCormick and Ms. Duncan said they weren't.

9月8号排练的时候，阿科斯塔问团员中是否还有人没有加入合唱团的Facebook群，排练计划都是在群里进行安排的。麦科米克和邓肯说他们还没加入。

That night, Mr. Acosta turned on his MacBook Pro and added the two new members to the chorus Facebook group. Facebook, then and now, offers three options for this sort of group: 'secret' (membership and discussions hidden to nonmembers), 'closed' (anybody can see the group and its members, but only members see posts), and 'open' (membership and content both public).

当晚，阿科斯塔打开了他的MacBook Pro笔记本，把两位新成员加进了合唱团的Facebook群。Facebook那时和现在都为这类群提供三种选择：“秘密（群成员身份和群讨论内容对非成员都是不可见的），“封闭（任何人都可以看见群及其成员身份，但是只有群成员才能看到所发的帖子）和“公开（群成员身份和群内容都是公开的）。

Mr. Acosta had chosen open. 'I was so gung-ho about the chorus being unashamedly loud and proud,' he says.

阿科斯塔选择的是公开。他说，“我太想让合唱团能够泰然自若地放声高歌了。

But there was a trade-off he says he didn't know about. When he added Ms. Duncan, which didn't require her prior online consent, Facebook posted a note to her all friends, including her father, telling them that she had joined the Queer Chorus.

但是他说他不知道存在那么一个协议。当他在群里添加邓肯的时候，事先不需要征得她的在线许可，Facebook向包括她父亲在内的所有好友发出了一条通知，告知他们她已经加入了Queer Chorus合唱团。

When Mr. Acosta pushed the button, Facebook allowed him to override the intent of the individual privacy settings Ms. Duncan and Mr. McCormick had used to hide posts from their fathers. Facebook's online help center explains that open groups, as well as closed groups, are visible to the public and will publish notification to users' friends. But Facebook doesn't allow users to approve before a friend adds them to a group, or to hide their addition from friends.

当阿科斯塔点按按钮的时候，Facebook允许他覆盖了邓肯和麦科米克为防止他们的父亲看到自己的帖子所进行的个人隐私设置。Facebook的在线帮助中心解释说，公开群和封闭群对公众都是可见的，会向用户的好友发送通知，但是Facebook让用户的好友将其添加到一个群里之前无须获得用户的同意，也不让用户对好友隐瞒自己加入的群。

After being contacted by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook adjusted the language in its online Help Center to explain situations, like the one that arose with Queer Chorus, in which friends can see that people have joined groups.

在《华尔街日报》（The Wall Street Journal）与之取得联系之后，Facebook对其在线帮助中心里解释情况的语言进行了调整，比如Queer Chorus合唱团这种情形，谁加入了群，好友都看得到。

Facebook also added a link to this new explanation directly from the screen where users create groups.

Facebook还把这条新的解释直接链接到了用户创建群的页面。

'I was figuring out the rules by trial and error,' says Mr. Acosta.

阿科斯塔说，“我当初努力去搞清楚这些规则，还是理解错了。

A few hours later, Ms. Duncan's father began leaving her angry voice mails, according to Ms. Duncan and a friend who was present.

据邓肯和当时在场的一个朋友说，几个小时以后，邓肯的父亲就开始在她的语音信箱愤怒地留言了。

'No no no no no no no,' Ms. Duncan recalls telling a friend. 'I have him hidden from my updates, but he saw this,' she said. 'He saw it.'

邓肯记得自己对一个朋友说，“不会，不会，不会。她说，“我已经设置不让他看到我更新的内容，但是他还是看到这个了。他看到了。

Ms. Duncan's father didn't respond to requests for comment for this article.

邓肯的父亲对邀请他就本文发表评论的请求没有做出任何回应。

Her father called repeatedly that night, she says, and when they spoke, he threatened to stop paying her car insurance. He told her to go on Facebook and renounce the chorus and gay lifestyles.

那天晚上她父亲不断给他打电话，她说，在通话中，他威胁要停止支付她的汽车保费。他叫她在Facebook上发表声明退出合唱团、放弃同性恋的生活方式。

On his Facebook page, he wrote two days later: 'To all you queers. Go back to your holes and wait for GOD,' according to text provided by Ms. Duncan. 'Hell awaits you pervert. Good luck singing there.'

邓肯提供的文本显示，两天后，他在自己的Facebook主页上写道，“我要正告你们这些同性恋者，回到你们的洞里去等待上帝。地狱在等待你们这些变态的人，祝你们好运，能够到那里去唱歌。

Ms. Duncan says she fell into depression for weeks. 'I couldn't function,' she says. 'I would be in class and not hear a word anyone was saying.'

邓肯说她好几周都处在抑郁状态。她说，“我无法做任何事，我去上课，但是任何人说的话我都听不见。

Mr. McCormick's mother phoned him the night his name joined the Queer Chorus group. 'She said, 'S--- has hit the fan . . . Your dad has found out.' I asked how,' Mr. McCormick recalled, 'and she said it was all over Facebook.'

麦科米克的母亲在他的名字被添加进Queer Chorus群的当晚给他打来电话。麦科米克回忆说，“她说，‘麻烦大了……你爸爸已经发现了。’我问她怎么发现的，她说Facebook上到处都传遍了。

His father didn't talk to his son for three weeks, the younger Mr. McCormick says. 'He just dropped off the face of my earth.'

麦科米克说，他父亲三个星期没跟儿子说话，“他就这样不再出现在我的世界里。

Mr. McCormick's father declined to participate in this article.

麦科米克的父亲拒绝接受本文记者的采访。

Privacy critics including the American Civil Liberties Union say Facebook has slowly shifted the defaults on its software to reveal more information about people to the public and to Facebook's corporate partners.

包括美国公民自由联盟（American Civil Liberties Union，简称ACLU）在内的隐私权批评者说，Facebook逐渐改变了它的软件默认参数，向公众及Facebook的企业伙伴泄露了更多的个人信息。

'Users are often unaware of the extent to which their information is available,' says Chris Conley, technology and civil-liberties attorney at the ACLU of Northern California. 'And if sensitive info is released, it is often impossible to put the cat back in the bag.'

ACLU北加利福尼亚分会的技术与民权律师克里斯·康利（Chris Conley）说，“用户经常不知道自己个人信息公开的程度。敏感信息一旦发布出来，秘密往往不可能保守得祝

Facebook executives say that they have added increasingly more privacy controls, because that encourages people to share. 'It is all about making it easier to share with exactly who you want and never be surprised about who sees something,' said Chris Cox, Facebook's vice president of product, in an interview in August 2011 as the site unveiled new privacy controls. Facebook declined to make Mr. Cox available for this article.

Facebook高管说，他们逐渐增加了更多的隐私控制措施，因为那样做可以鼓励人们分享信息。2011年8月在该网站公布新的隐私控制措施时，Facebook的产品副总裁克里斯·考克斯（Chris Cox）在接受采访时说，“事情的初衷都是为了让你与你确切选择的人之间的信息分享更加容易而不必惊异于谁看到了什么。Facebook公司拒绝让考克斯接受本文记者的采访。