社交軟件獲取通訊錄信息 這可不是件好事!
When you install an app on your smartphone, you're often asked whether you'd like to share your list of contacts with that app.
當你在智能手機上安裝應用時，經常會被詢問是否允許該應用讀取你的通訊錄。That might be a convenient way to connect with friends and family likewise using, say, Instagram or Whatsapp, but it also means you're giving away their personal information to the app developers.
通常這會便於你聯繫同樣使用Instagram或Whatsapp等社交軟件的朋友和家人，但是這也意味着你將個人信息透露給了應用開發人員。And that personal info could end up being used to create so-called "shadow profiles" of your contacts—even if they don't use that app or social media service.
而這些個人信息最終可能會被用來創建聯繫人的所謂“影子檔案”，即使他們並不使用該應用或社交媒體服務。
Shadow profiles emerged as a potential problem in 2011 when an Ireland-based advocacy group accused Facebook of gathering information on nonusers, including names, email addresses, phone numbers and physical addresses.
2011年，影子檔案成爲潛在問題，當時一個總部位於愛爾蘭的倡導團體起訴Facebook收集非用戶的信息，這些信息包括姓名、電郵地址、手機號碼和物理地址。
The following year researchers showed that social network companies such as Facebook could use machine learning to pretty accurately predict whether two nonmembers known by the same member also know one another. Not exactly Big Brother, but a recent study in the journal Science Advances raises the stakes.
2012年，研究人員發現，像Facebook這樣的社交網絡公司會利用機器學習進行相當準確的預測，即認識同一名會員的兩個非會員之間是否也互相認識。這並不是監視，但近期發表在《科學進展》期刊上的研究引發了關注。In that work, David Garcia, chair of systems design at the sci-tech university ETH Zürich, used a social network member's personal information to infer relationship status and sexual orientation of the members' contacts who did not have their own user accounts on that social networking site.
在這項研究中，蘇黎世聯邦理工學院系統設計系主任大衛·加西亞利用某個社交網絡成員的個人信息，推斷出了成員聯繫人的情感狀態和性取向，而這些聯繫人並沒有該社交網絡的賬號。He was able to do that using, of all things, data from the now defunct Friendster social networking site.
而他竟然是從已經失效的社交網站Friendster上獲得數據並推斷出的結果。He says he chose those two attributes—relationship status and sexual orientation—because they can carry important privacy consequences and were both available in the Friendster data set.
他表示，他選擇情感狀態和性取向這兩個屬性，是因爲它們具有重要的隱私意義，而且都能在Friendster網站的資料組中獲取。Garcia is careful to point out that he didn't prove that shadow profiles exist, just that they can be created. His work also reminds us how much we wind up revealing onlin -- about ourselves and about the people in our lives.
加西亞謹慎地指出，他並沒有證明影子檔案的存在，只是證明了它們能被創造出來。他的研究也提醒我們在網上暴露了多少關於我們自己以及我們生活中的人的信息。
