[Economist] 他们掌握了什么？（下）

What do they know?

他们掌握了什么？

Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook product manager, says that sending Mr Dehaye his Pixel data would be technically difficult. Facebook’s global corporate structure makes it even harder. Employees of Facebook Ireland, he says, have “no power or leverage to tell an engineer at Menlo Park” to do anything, including retrieving Mr Dehaye’s data.

前脸书产品经理 Antonio García Martínez 表示，从技术上而言把 Pixel 软件收集的关于 Dehaye 先生的数据提供给他本人将是困难的。脸书的全球化运营更是增添了这一复杂度。他表示，爱尔兰的脸书员工“无权也无力指示门洛帕克市的脸书工程师“该怎么做，比如取得 Dehaye 先生的个人数据。

Other Europeans run into similar quagmires with American tech companies. Millie Graham Wood, a solicitor with Privacy International, a charity, has tried for six months to find out what data Google has collected from her Nest smart thermostat. The firm has sent her only links to privacy policies, blog posts and irrelevant log data, each time after a long delay. “It’s been a real nightmare,” says Ms Wood. “If you’re not a lawyer, you’re going to give up.” She has appealed to Britain’s data-protection regulator.

其他欧洲人在处理和美国科技公司的相关问题时也陷入了类似的困境。服务于一家名为隐私国际的慈善组织的事务律师 Millie Graham Wood 花了六个月的时间去搞清谷歌公司通过她的巢式智能恒温器收集了那些数据。谷歌公司只是将隐私政策的链接、博客文章和无关的数据记录发送给她，并且每次都是在拖延很久之后。Wood 女士表示“这就是一个噩梦，如果你不是一个律师，可能一定会放弃的”。她已经向英国数据保护管理机构上诉。

The tech companies prefer to meet their obligations through web portals which let people download some, but not necessarily all, of their data. That may not be enough, especially if the portal includes data that users have uploaded themselves, but not the way the system categorises them. The GDPR makes few changes to subject-access rights, other than removing a small fee which data controllers had been able to charge. This is likely to lead to more requests. Refusal to provide the requested data has never been tested in court. As Europeans fret ever more about what data moguls know about them, that is likely to change.

科技公司倾向于通过网络入口的方式来履行这些义务，比如让用户下载关于他们自己的部分，但并不是全部数据。这样的做法可能并不足够，特别是当这些数据包括了用户自己上传的那部分，却并没有关于公司是如何分类使用这些数据的内容。GDPR 在针对获取数据的权利上面做出了一点改变，而不是仅仅对那些数据保有公司进行减税，而这些税公司完全负担得起。这会导致更多针对获取自身数据的请求。拒绝提供这些数据会在法庭上带来怎样的后果尚不明确。当欧洲公民越来越担忧数据大亨通过数据来认识他们时，局面将会发生改变。