你愿意让谷歌掌握你所有的小秘密吗？

    而如果施密特说那番话是认真的（不仅仅为了挑战舆论），那他的这个观点就很难跟目前的现实对上号。眼下，数字沟通渠道大量出现，明显是在传递各种高度私密、甚至是匿名进行的数字互动。我们在最近为全球各大科技公司所做的项目中已经发现，年轻用户开始把Facebook这样众所周知的公共平台仅仅当成“维持网络形象”的地方，也就是只适合放一些关于个人的最普通、最俗套的信息。

    他们早已转到Snapchat, Whisper和Between这样的应用上分享更有价值、更“真实”的内容了——圈内笑话、捕风捉影的最新消息、“我现在想你了”这类小手势。这些数字互动中绝大多数内容都不适合公开，这也是为什么它对用户来说如此重要的部分原因。但往往正是这种内容，有点越界、实验性的、没有根据或比较奇怪，才构成生气勃勃的美国文化的基础。你可以问这么一个问题：一个完全没有任何秘密的人还值得认识吗？

    美国文化产品的关键驱动力是生机勃勃的公民社会——正是在生意圈和政府之外的那些私人交往才让各种新点子层出不穷。从斯塔西（Stasi，前民主德国国家安全局——译注）到麦卡锡主义，再到塞勒姆审巫案等，我们无须回顾历史就能了解由于公民社会崩解在文化上造成的灾难性后果。在上述例子中，剥夺公民的隐私权正是当局最重要的手段；知道自己随时被监控会产生一种标准化效果，就是公民慢慢地会把外在的监控内在化，使自己的行为越来越缺少特点。

    可能大家会想，只要我们没干什么违法的事，没密谋推翻政权，那暴露点自己的隐私又有什么关系呢？毕竟阳光才是最好的消毒剂嘛。看看另一个例子：据说有40%到76%的婚姻会在某个时候出现一方不忠。婚外情就是一种被看得很紧却又十分普遍的秘密。现在请想象一下，所有婚外情和调情都变成公开信息了。想想看，如果谷歌让你，你的朋友，政府都能看到这种信息，还有所有有关你出轨时的感受、幽会的汽车旅馆1到5分的评级的原始数据，你会作何感想。难道这种信息也要大白于天下吗？

    不要让科技行业用各种高尚说辞给你套上枷锁，任凭他们以进步的名义牺牲你的隐私。相反，停下来想一想。确实是时候好好想想了，不光要想可能会发生什么，更要想想什么才是更可取的。我们这个社会到底想要什么？（财富中文网）

    本文作者克里斯蒂安•梅德斯伯格是ReD Associates公司的资深合伙人，这是一家以人文科学为基础的战略及创新咨询公司。他著有《清晰时刻：用人文科学解决最棘手商业问题》。

    译者：清远

    And if Schmidt was being serious (rather than merely provocative), it's hard to square his perspective with the explosion of digital communication channels that explicitly deliver highly private, even anonymous, digital interactions. In our recent projects for global technology companies, we've seen firsthand how younger users especially are beginning to treat highly public platforms like Facebook (FB) as mere "online image maintenance," suitable for only the most banal and generic information.

    They've turned instead to apps like Snapchat, Whisper, and Between to share more high-value and "real" content -- the inside jokes, the unscripted updates, the small gestures of "I'm thinking of you now." Much of the actual content of these digital interactions is unsuitable for public consumption, part of what makes it so valuable to users. But it's often this type of content, the slightly transgressive, experimental, unproven or strange, that's been the basis of America's vibrant culture. You could ask the question: Is a person who has nothing to hide worth knowing?

    A key driver of our cultural output is our robust civil society -- the private sphere of human interactions outside of business or government that creates and nurtures new ideas. We don't need to go back far in history -- the Stasi, McCarthyism, the Salem witch trials, etc. -- to observe the disastrous cultural effects wrought by the breakdown of civil society. In all of these cases, the usurping of privacy was a key tool of the regime in control; the perception of being constantly watched created a normalizing effect, where citizens slowly internalized the surveillance and modified their behaviors to be less and less idiosyncratic.

    Maybe you're still thinking, but yes, as long as we're not doing anything illegal, overturning the state, say, what harm is there in a little exposure? Sunlight is the best disinfectant, after all. Consider another example: It is said that 40% to 76% of all marriages will be hit with infidelity at some point. Infidelities are a closely guarded but a fairly common secret. Now imagine if all instances of infidelity and flirting became public data. Imagine if Google (GOOG) made this data available to you, your friends, and the government, together with all the accompanying metadata of how you were feeling at the time and how good the motel was on a 1 to 5 scale. Does that information really want to be free?

    Instead of letting the tech industry lock you into a rhetorical stronghold -- your privacy in the name of their progress -- stop for a moment. It's time to really think -- not just about what's possible, but about what's preferable. What do we really want as a society?

    Christian Madsbjerg is a senior partner at ReD Associates, a strategy and innovation consulting firm based in the human sciences. He is author of The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems.