来源：《华盛顿邮报》
原文刊登日期：2022年2月14日
Every month seems to bring a new salvo against Big Tech — the latest from three state attorneys general and the District’s Karl A. Racine. The lawsuit argues that Google has deceived customers into giving up sensitive data. Yet the problem is bigger than one company, and the solution can’t come only from the courts.
每个月似乎都有针对大型科技公司的新攻势——最新攻势来自三个州的总检察长和华盛顿哥伦比亚特区的卡尔·拉辛检察长。该诉讼称，谷歌欺骗用户，让用户交出敏感数据。然而，这个问题不仅仅是一家公司的问题，解决方案也不能仅仅来自法院系统。
The complaints filed in late January by the top enforcers in D.C., Indiana, Texas and Washington allege that the world’s largest search engine told users they could prevent the company from tracking their location in account settings. In reality, the data was nonetheless hoovered up by other means. The suit also dwells on Google’s alleged employment of “dark patterns” to coerce individuals into picking not the options that best suit them but the options that best suit the business — by hiding opt-outs in complex navigation menus, for example, or constantly nudging a consumer to opt in. Google argues that its controls are transparent and robust.
哥伦比亚特区、印第安纳州、得克萨斯州和华盛顿州的最高执法人员于1月下旬提起诉讼，称全球最大的搜索引擎告诉用户，他们可以阻止谷歌在账户设置中追踪他们的位置。但实际上，这些数据是通过其他方式收集的。诉讼中还反复提到谷歌涉嫌使用“黑暗模式”，迫使个人选择最有利于谷歌的选项，而不是最适合自己的选项——例如，通过将“退出选项”隐藏在复杂的导航菜单中，或不断鼓动消费者开启某些设置。谷歌辩称，它的控制是透明和稳健的。
So far, the firm has had the better of it before the bench: An Arizona judge earlier this year kicked a similar case to trial for further fact-finding, but in doing so he pointed out that Google’s policies inform users of the company’s data-collection practices. Attorneys general are relying on existing consumer protection statutes to police platforms because Congress and most state legislatures have failed to craft rules befitting the surveillance economy that characterizes today’s Internet. Yet every case is a reminder of just how necessary and overdue those rules are — especially the comprehensive federal framework that lawmakers have been trying and failing to negotiate for the past few years.
迄今为止，谷歌在法庭上的表现要好一些：今年早些时候，亚利桑那州的一名法官将一起类似的案件推到庭审中，要求进一步调查事实，但他在庭审中指出，谷歌的政策告知了用户谷歌的数据收集做法。检察长们依靠现有的消费者保护法规来监管互联网平台，因为国会和大多数州的立法机构未能制定出适合当今互联网监控经济的法规。然而，每一个案件都在提醒人们，这些法规是多么的必要并且早就应该有了——尤其是立法者们在过去几年一直试图谈判却未能达成的全面的联邦隐私法框架。
The phenomenon the recent suits describe, after all, is not particular to Google but rather endemic to almost the entirety of the Web: Companies get to set all the convoluted terms of service that even those capable of decoding the legalistic language rarely bother to read. Other mechanisms for notice and consent, such as opt-outs and opt-ins, create similar problems. Control for the consumer is mostly an illusion. The federal privacy law the country has sorely needed for decades would replace this old regime with meaningful limitations on what data companies can collect and in what contexts, so that the burden would be on them not to violate the reasonable expectations of their users, rather than placing the burden on the users to spell out what information they will and will not allow the tech firms to have.
毕竟，最近的诉讼所描述的现象并不是谷歌特有的，而是几乎整个网络的普遍现象：公司可以设定所有令人费解的服务条款，即使那些能够解读法律语言的人也很少费心去阅读。其他通知和同意机制，如选择退出和开启某些选项，也会产生类似的问题。对消费者来说，自己掌控多半是一种幻觉。美国几十年来迫切需要的联邦隐私法将取代这一旧制度，对公司可以收集什么数据以及在什么情况下收集数据进行有意义的限制，这样企业就有责任不违反用户的合理期望，而不是让用户承担责任，说明他们会和不会允许科技公司拥有哪些信息。
The question shouldn’t be whether companies gather unnecessary amounts of sensitive information about their users sneakily — it should be whether companies amass these troves at all. Until Congress ensures that’s true for the whole country, Americans will be clicking through policies and prompts that do little to protect them.
问题不应该是公司是否偷偷收集了用户不必要的敏感信息，而应该是公司是否真的积累了这些信息。在国会确保这一点适用于整个国家之前，美国人将会继续点击那些几乎没有保护他们的政策和提示。