A quarter of a century ago, Scott McNealy, then chief executive of Sun Microsystems, famously dismissed consumer privacy in the internet age as an anachronistic distraction. “You have zero privacy anyway,” he said. “Get over it.” Judging by the way in which consumers have since posted details of their private lives all over social media and breezily ticked the intrusive terms and conditions boxes of many online companies, McNealy may have had a point.
四分之一个世纪前，时任太阳计算机(Sun Microsystems)首席执行官的斯科特•麦克尼利(Scott McNealy)以一种引人注目的方式对互联网时代的消费者隐私问题不屑一顾。他说：“你根本没有隐私，接受现实吧。”从消费者此后在社交媒体上到处发布自己的私人生活细节，并轻松勾选许多在线公司的侵入性条款和条件框来看，麦克尼利可能是有道理的。
But how we act and what we think can be two different things. Internet users do not appear to have “got over it” when it comes to privacy. Indeed, consumers are now telling pollsters that they increasingly worry about the misuse of their personal data and want stricter controls. A Pew Research poll in the US last year found that 81 per cent of respondents were concerned about how companies collected their data; 71 per cent expressed similar concerns about the government (compared with 64 per cent in 2019).
但我们的行为和想法可能是两回事。在隐私问题上，互联网用户似乎并没有“释怀”。事实上，消费者现在告诉民意调查机构，他们越来越担心个人数据的滥用，并希望加强控制。去年，皮尤研究公司(Pew Research)在美国进行的一项调查发现，81%的受访者担心公司如何收集他们的数据；71%的人对政府表达了类似的担忧（相比之下，2019年为64%）。