Imagine being talked about behind your back. Now picture that conversation taking place covertly in your own sitting room, with you unable to hear it.

想象一下有人在你背后谈论你。现在设想一下，这样的谈话就悄悄发生在你家客厅里，而你却无法听到。

That is the modus operandi of SilverPush, an Indian start-up that embeds inaudible sounds in television advertisements. As the advert plays, a high-frequency signal is emitted that can be picked up by a mobile or other device installed with an app containing SilverPush software. This “pairing” — currently targeted at Indian consumers — also identifies users’ other nearby devices and allows the company to monitor what they do across those. All without consumers hearing a thing.

这就是印度创业企业SilverPush的做法，该公司在电视广告里嵌入听不到的声音。广告播放时，会发出一种高频信号，安装有内置SilverPush软件的应用的手机或其他设备可接收到这种信号。这种“配对”——目前是针对印度消费者的——也会识别出用户附近的其他设备，让该公司得以监控他们在这些设备上做些什么。这一切都在消费者无知无觉的情况下发生。

This “cross-device tracking technology”, being explored by other companies including Adobe, is an emblem of a new era with which all of us — governments, companies, charities and consumers — will have to contend.

这种“跨设备跟踪技术”——包括Adobe在内的其他公司也在探索此技术——标志着一个新时代的来临。这个新时代是所有人——政府、公司、慈善机构和消费者——将不得不应对的。

Last month, the Royal Statistical Society hosted a conference at Windsor castle to ponder the challenges of Big Data — an overused, underexplained term for both the flood of information churned out by our devices and the potential for this flood to be organised into revelatory and predictive rivers of knowledge.

不久前，英国皇家统计学会(Royal Statistical Society)在温莎(Windsor)城堡召开了一次大会，思考大数据带来的挑战。大数据是一个被滥用、内涵解释欠清楚的术语，既指我们的设备产生的海量信息流，也指把这些信息整理为分门别类的一股股具有揭示性和预见性的信息流的潜力。

The setting was apt: the ethics and governance surrounding the growing use of data are a right royal mess. Public discussion about how these vast quantities of information should be collected, stored, cross-referenced and exploited is urgently needed. There is excitement about how it might revolutionise healthcare — during outbreaks of disease, for example, search data can be mined for the greater good. Today, however, public engagement largely amounts to public outcry when things go wrong.

这次大会召开得正是时候：围绕日益增加的数据使用的伦理和治理可谓一团糟。目前迫切需要就这些海量数据应当如何收集、存储、相互参照和利用展开公众讨论。有人对大数据可能催生医疗革命感到兴奋：比如说，在疾病爆发时，可以为了更高的利益挖掘搜索数据。然而，如今，当出现糟糕情况时，公众讨论很大程度上变成公众的强烈声讨。

The extent to which tech shapes our lives — the average British adult spends more than 20 hours a week online, according to a report by UK media regulator Ofcom — means our behaviour, habits, desires and aspirations can be revealed by our swipes and keystrokes.

英国媒体监管机构英国通信办公室(Ofcom)的一份报告显示，英国成年人平均每周在线时间超过20小时。科技对我们生活的巨大影响，意味着我们的行为、习惯、欲望和抱负都可以通过触摸屏和键盘操作显露出来。

This has made analysis of online be a new Klondike. Personal data are like gold dust, and we surrender them every time we casually click “OK” to a website’s terms and conditions.

这使得对在线行为的分析成为一座新的金矿。个人数据就像金砂，每次我们随意对一家网站的条款与条件点击“确定”时，就把我们的个人数据交了出去。

And here is our first problem: most of us click unthinkingly (it is usually impenetrable legalese, anyhow). It is thus questionable whether we have given informed consent to all the ways in which our personal data are subsequently used. To demonstrate this, a security company set up a public WiFi spot in the City of London and inserted a “Herod clause” committing users to hand over their firstborn for eternity. Within a short period of time, several people unwittingly bartered away their offspring in return for a free connection.

这是我们面临的第一个问题：我们中大多数人都是不假思索地点击的（不过，条款与条件通常是难懂的法律措辞）。那么，我们对自己的个人数据随后被使用的各种情形是否行使了知情同意权，就成了疑问。为了证明这一点，一家安全公司在伦敦金融城(City of London)设立了一个公共WiFi热点，并嵌入一个“希律条款”(Herod Clause)，要求用户承诺永远放弃他们的第一个孩子。在很短时间内，就有不少人为了免费上会儿网稀里糊涂地放弃了自己的孩子。

Legal challenges aside, there is rarely independent scrutiny of what is a fair and reasonable relationship between an online company and its consumers. Facebookfell foul of this when it manipulated the news feeds of nearly 700,000 users for a psychology experiment. Users claimed they had been duped by the study, which found that those exposed to fewer positive news stories were more likely to write negative posts. The company retorted that consent had already been given. Approval last week of EU data protection rules permitting hefty fines for privacy breaches may prevent a repetition; consent will no longer be the elastic commodity it was.

除了法律挑战，关于网络公司及其消费者之间公平与恰当的关系应该是怎样的，我们也很少进行过独立的审视。Facebook在这一点上便曾引起众怒，因为它为了做一个心理实验，对近70万用户的动态消息动了手脚。用户们声称，他们被那项研究给耍了，研究结果显示，那些接收到更少积极消息的人更可能写出消极的内容。Facebook反驳称，他们已获得了用户的同意。不久前，欧盟通过了数据保护规则，新规允许对侵犯隐私的行为处以高额罚款，这或许能阻止类似情况再次发生；用户不再像以往那样无论代价如何都只能被动同意了。

A second challenge arises from the so-called internet of things, when devices bypass humans and talk directly to one another. So my depleted smart fridge could automatically email the supermarket requesting replenishment. But it could also mean my gossiping gadgets become a network of electronic spies that can paint a richly detailed picture of my prandial and other proclivities, raising privacy concerns. Indeed, at a robotics conference last month, technologists identified the ability of robots to collect data, especially in private homes, as the single biggest ethical issue in that field.

第二个挑战源自各种设备绕过人类、直接彼此对话的所谓物联网。所以，我的智能冰箱在储存消耗光了的时候可以自动给超市发电邮，要求补货。但这也可以意味着，我的那些“八卦”的设备构成了一张电子间谍网，它可以绘制出一幅有关我的饮食与其他癖性的极其详尽的图画，令人担心隐私暴露。实际上，在不久前的一个机器人学大会上，技术专家们把机器人收集数据（尤其是在私人住所里）的能力认定为大数据领域最大的单个伦理问题。

Alongside the new EU rules on data protection, we need something softer: a body of experts and laypeople that can bring knowledge, wisdom and judgment to this fast-moving field. There is already a Council for Big Data, Ethics and Society in the US, comprising lawyers, philosophers and anthropologists.

除了欧盟新的数据保护规则外，我们也需要更软性的方式：一个由专家和非专业人员构成的机构，为这一快速发展的领域带来知识、智慧和判断力。眼下，美国已有了一个由律师、哲学家和人类学家组成的大数据、伦理与社会委员会(Council for Big Data, Ethics and Society)。

Europe should follow this example — because, as a stream of anecdotes at the Windsor conference revealed, companies and academics to be navigating this new data-rich world without a moral compass. In 2012 a Russian company created Girls Around Me, an app that pooled publicly available information to show the real-time locations and pictures of nearby women, without their consent; the app, a stalker’s dream, was withdrawn. High-tech rubbish bins in London’s Square Mile, which captured information from smartphones to track unwitting owners’ movements in order to target them with advertising, were ditched on grounds of creepiness.

欧洲应当仿效美国的做法，因为正如温莎大会上的一连串趣闻所显示的那样，公司和学术界人士在这个数据丰富的新世界航行时，似乎没有带上伦理指南针。2012年，一家俄罗斯公司推出了一款名为“Girls Around Me”的应用(App)，可以汇集公开可见的信息，在不经使用者附近女性同意的情况下显示她们的实时位置和照片。这款跟踪骚扰者梦寐以求的应用被撤下了。“平方英里”（Square Mile，即伦敦金融城，因面积正好1平方英里得名——译者注）的高科技电子垃圾箱捕捉来自智能手机的信息，以跟踪不知情的机主的行踪，从而针对他们发布广告，这些垃圾桶因令人毛骨悚然而被取缔。

Meanwhile, a scientist has created software that combs Twitter connections to infer a tweeter’s ethnicity and even religion, raising the question of whether public posts can legitimately be used to deduce private information. Do we, as one lawyer suggested,need laws against misuse of our online personae?

同时，一名科学家做了一款软件，能够通过彻底搜查推特(Twitter)人脉图，推断一名推特用户的种族、甚至宗教，这引发了使用公开发言推断私人信息是否合法的疑问。我们是否如一名律师所认为的那样，需要出台防止个人在线角色被滥用的法律？

We have wearable devices that, like Santa, see you when you are sleeping and know when you’re awake. It is possible that a company will find a way of deducing — through sentiment analysis of social media postings, visits to charity websites, checks on your bank balance and fitness tracking — if you’ve been bad or good.

我们有了可穿戴设备，这些设备像圣诞老人一样，在你睡着时注视着你，也知道你何时是醒着的。一家公司有可能找到推断你近来生活是否积极向上的办法——通过分析社交媒体发言表现出的情绪、访问慈善网站以及核查你的银行存款余额和健康追踪。

This goes to show: just because big data makes it technically possible to do something, does not mean we should.

这证明：并非仅仅因为大数据使某事在技术上具备可行性，就意味着我们应该那么做。