Netflix的新记录片 《大黑客》，曝光了当下数字时代无处不在， 却难以感知的个人信息风险。
虽然川普已经在位子上稳稳地坐了3年多，并且正在争取连任，关于16年大选，社交网络颠覆性误导作用的猜测和调查，从未停歇。《大黑客》 中通过两个人物，重新讲述这个谜。
一个是教传媒的卡罗尔教授，当年他发现自己的个人身份信息被滥用后，告到了英国法庭，追查他个人信息如何被获取，交易，和使用。虽然最终没有结果，至少剑桥分析这一川普竞选团队背后的数据公司现了形。
另一个是剑桥分析公司的科学家凯撒女士，她和她的团队正是那场社交竞选战役背后的算法创造者。“数据的价值已经超过了石油”，是她在片中最震撼人心的言论。
纪录片展示了谜团：当你在手机上做的一切操作被记录时，你的手机无需被监听；但却无法揭示真相。一方面因为科技巨头们设计的算法太复杂，并且故意转移关键证据。另一方面，那里也缺乏对数据使用的保护法令，数据一直被认为是可以被免费获取和使用的，不得已，教授都只能求助于欧洲法，因为他的数据曾在那里被处理。
影片前两周才上市，可惜它还没有传到国内来。
同样的数据担忧，在我国一样严重。多数手机应用，无论是扫描个文件，查个植物名，还是评论一个美食，常常要求获取地理位置、查看相册，甚至获取通讯录，或进行人脸识别对比。所欲何为？ 显然，数据的安全，无法依赖科技来解决。 关于个人信息的立法，在将来几十年，必有艰苦的争论。
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下面是Techcrunch专栏记者写的一篇简介。用词精美，句式繁复，特此翻译如下。-
The Great Hack tells us data corrupts
Natasha Lomas@riptari
Cambridge Analytica probe
This week professor David Carroll, whose dogged search for answers to how his personal data was misused plays a focal role in The Great Hack: Netflix’s documentary tackling the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal, quipped that perhaps a follow up would be more punitive for the company than the $5BN FTC fine released the same day.
The documentary — which we previewed ahead of its general release Wednesday — does an impressive job of articulating for a mainstream audience the risks for individuals and society of unregulated surveillance capitalism, despite the complexities involved in the invisible data ‘supply chain’ that feeds the beast. Most obviously by trying to make these digital social emissions visible to the viewer — as mushrooming pop-ups overlaid on shots of smartphone users going about their everyday business, largely unaware of the pervasive tracking it enables.
Facebookis unlikely to be a fan of the treatment. In its own crisis PR around the Cambridge Analytica scandal it has sought to achieve the opposite effect; making it harder to join the data-dots embedded in its ad platform by seeking to deflect blame, bury key details and bore reporters and policymakers to death with reams of irrelevant detail — in the hope they might shift their attention elsewhere.
Data protection itself isn’t a topic that naturally lends itself to glamorous thriller treatment, of course. No amount of slick editing can transform the close and careful scrutiny of political committees into seat-of-the-pants viewing for anyone not already intimately familiar with the intricacies being picked over. And yet it’s exactly such thoughtful attention to detail that democracy demands. Without it we are all, to put it proverbially, screwed.
The Great Hack shows what happens when vital detail and context are cheaply ripped away at scale, via socially sticky content delivery platforms run by tech giants that never bothered to sweat the ethical detail of how their ad targeting tools could be repurposed by malign interests to sew social discord and/or manipulate voter opinion en mass.
Or indeed used by an official candidate for high office in a democratic society that lacks legal safeguards against data misuse.
But while the documentary packs in a lot over an almost two-hour span, retelling the story of Cambridge Analytica’srole in the 2016 Trump presidential election campaign; exploring links to the UK’s Brexit leave vote; and zooming out to show a little of the wider impact of social media disinformation campaigns on various elections around the world, the viewer is left with plenty of questions. Not least the ones Carroll repeats towards the end of the film: What information had Cambridge Analytica amassed on him? Where did they get it from? What did they use it for? — apparently resigning himself to never knowing. The disgraced data firm chose declaring bankruptcy and folding back into its shell vs handing over the stolen goods and its algorithmic secrets.
There’s no doubt over the other question Carroll poses early on the film — could he delete his information? The lack of control over what’s done with people’s information is the central point around which the documentary pivots. The key warning being there’s no magical cleansing fire that can purge every digitally copied personal thing that’s put out there.
And while Carroll is shown able to tap into European data rights — purely by merit of Cambridge Analytica having processed his data in the UK — to try and get answers, the lack of control holds true in the US. Here, the absence of a legal framework to protect privacy is shown as the catalyzing fuel for the ‘great hack’ — and also shown enabling the ongoing data-free-for-all that underpins almost all ad-supported, Internet-delivered services. tl;dr: Your phone doesn’t need to listen to if it’s tracking everything else you do with it.
The film’s other obsession is the breathtaking scale of the thing. One focal moment is when we hear another central character, Cambridge Analytica’s Brittany Kaiser, dispassionately recounting how data surpassed oil in value last year — as if that’s all the explanation needed for the terrible behavior on show.
“Data’s the most valuable asset on Earth,” she monotones. The staggering value of digital stuff is thus fingered as an irresistible, manipulative force also sucking in bright minds to work at data firms like Cambridge Analytica — even at the expense of their own claimed political allegiances, in the conflicted case of Kaiser.
If knowledge is power and power corrupts, the construction can be refined further to ‘data corrupts’, is the suggestion.
The filmmakers linger long on Kaiser which can seem to humanize her — as they show what appear vulnerable or intimate moments. Yet they do this without ever entirely getting under her skin or allowing her role in the scandal to be fully resolved.
She’s often allowed to tell her narrative from behind dark glasses and a hat — which has the opposite effect on how we’re invited to perceive her. Questions about her motivations are never far away. It’s a human mystery linked to Cambridge Analytica’s money-minting algorithmic blackbox.
Nor is there any attempt by the filmmakers to mine Kaiser for answers themselves. It’s a documentary that spotlights mysteries and leaves questions hanging up there intact. From a journalist perspective that’s an inevitable frustration. Even as the story itself is much bigger than any one of its constituent parts.
It’s hard to imagine how Netflixcould commission a straight up sequel to The Great Hack, given its central framing of Carroll’s data quest being combined with key moments of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Large chunks of the film are comprised from capturing scrutiny and reactions to the story unfolding in real-time.
But in displaying the ruthlessly transactional underpinnings of social platforms where the world’s smartphone users go to kill time, unwittingly trading away their agency in the process, Netflix has really just begun to open up the defining story of our time.
《大黑客》告诉我们数据腐败
剑桥分析公司探秘
本周，在Netflix出品的影片《大黑客》中，戴维·卡罗尔教授对他个人信息被滥用问题的不懈追问成为了焦点，在这部关于脸书-剑桥分析公司数据丑闻的纪录片中，他打趣说，或许对影片的一个赞同比同天宣布的$ 50亿美元美国贸易委员会罚款对这些公司更有惩罚性。
这部纪录片-- 我们在星期三正式宣发前已经试看过–令人印象深刻，为主流观众阐明了不受管制的监视资本主义对个人和社会的风险性，尽管那些饲养巨兽的无形数据“供应链”的复杂性。最明显的是争取让观者清楚的看到数字社交的发散–在智能手机使用的日常照片上用碎片如雨般发射的方式，显示用户大多数意识不到的那些广泛的跟踪。
Facebook不太可能成为这种手法的粉丝。在它自己应对剑桥分析丑闻的危机公关中，积极的营造相反的印象;通过试图转移责任，让人们更难汇集内嵌于它的广告平台的埋点，掩埋关键细节并用大量的无关细节把记者和政策制定者们烦到死–以他们能将注意力转移到其他地方。
当然，数据保护本身并不是一个天然地引起极度恐慌的话题。再高超的剪辑也无法把政治委员会抽丝剥茧的审核过程变成通俗易懂的画面，对于那些原来对这里的盘根错节不太熟悉的人来说。然而，这种对细节的仔细推敲正是民主所需要的。如果没有它，显而易见地，我们所有人都将玩完。
《大黑客》揭示了当重要细节和背景信息被大规模廉价地获取的后果，通过科技巨头们运营的具有社交粘性的内容输送平台，而巨头们从来都不愿披露那些，关于他们的广告定位工具如何被恶势力利用，以制造社会不和谐及/或操纵选民的集体意志，等等的道德细节。
或者确实如一位民主党高层职位的正式候选人所使用的那样，对数据滥用缺乏律法屏障。
但是，虽然这部纪录片在近两个小时的片长内囊括了很多内容，重新讲述剑桥分析公司在2016年特朗普总统竞选活动中的角色;探索与英国脱欧投票的关联；并粗略的展示了社交媒体的假消息广告对世界范围内各种选举的更广泛地影响，观者仍然被留下大量的疑问。至少卡罗尔在电影结束时重复地问：剑桥分析公司积攒了哪些有关他的信息？他们从哪里得到的？他们用它来干什么？ - 显然他不甘心，但始终无法得到答案。这家不光彩的数据公司选择了宣布破产，躲回壳中，而不是交出他偷到的物资及算法秘密。
卡罗尔在电影刚开始时抛出的另一个问题是毫无疑问的- 他可以删除自己的信息吗？对个人信息的使用缺乏控制是纪录片想要展现的核心点。最主要的警告是没有什么神奇的净化火可以一把清除这些数字化存储的被攫取的个人信息。
并且，虽然片中显示卡罗尔能够利用欧洲的数据权 - 纯粹是因为剑桥分析公司在英国处理过他的数据–来争取得到答案，在美国（对数据）缺乏控制权却是现实。在这里，缺乏保护隐私的法律框架显然成为了“大黑客”的催化剂–并且被爆出造成了数据对所有人持续免费，奠定了几乎所有广告支持的，通过互联网提供的服务的基础。你的手机不需要监听，如果它跟踪所有你用它做的其他事情。
本片另一个令人着迷的地方是那些事情让人吃惊的规模。一个高潮片段是当我们听到影片的另一个中心人物，剑桥分析公司的布列塔尼凯撒，冷静地叙述数据是如何在去年超过石油的价值 - 好像这就是对那些可怕行为所需的全部解释。
“数据是地球上最有价值的资产，”她语气平淡地说。因此，数字资料的惊人价值被视为一种不可抗拒的，可操控的力量，也吸引那些聪明的脑袋来为剑桥分析这样的数据公司工作–甚至放弃了他们曾声称的政治忠诚，Kaiser的就是这么一个矛盾的例子。
如果知识就是权力而权力腐败了，那么解释可以进一步提炼为“数据腐败”，影片建议说。
影片的制作者们在凯撒这个人物上花了很长时间，试图让她更有人情味–正如他们表现的那些看似脆弱或温情的时刻。然而，他们这样做却完全没有伸入她的内在，或者让她在丑闻中扮演的角色得到充分的解释。
她常常被允许从一副黑眼镜和帽子后面进行她的自述 - 这对我们被邀请来了解她的初衷产生了相反的效果。质疑她的动机的疑问从未远离。这是与剑桥分析的赚钱算法黑盒子有关的人的秘密。
电影制作人也没有试图挖据凯撒让自己得到答案。这是一部纪录片，凸显了谜团，然后将问题完整的留在那里。从记者的角度来看，这是一种不可避免的败笔。即使因为故事本身比任何一个组成部分都要大得多。
很难想象Netflix将如何制作The Great Hack的续集，因为影片的中心线即卡罗尔Carrol对数据的质问已经包括了剑桥分析丑闻的主要时间节点。电影中的大部分内容由捕捉审核和反馈到故事随时间线展开组成。
但是，在展示社交平台，这个全球用户用来消磨时间，却在期间不知不觉地卖了他们的代理权的无情交易基础时，Netflix确实只是刚开始揭示这个属于我们时代的故事。