Nowhere to Hide
A. Read the article and match the main ideas with the paragraphs.
1. People willingly supply information about themselves in everyday life, which is used by data companies.
2. The change of social values in the U.S.A. threatens privacy.
3. A certain group of people may be discriminated due to a free access to any information.
4. There are a lot of consumers of combined confidential information.
5. The main principle of the national philosophy is the absence of confidentiality.
6. Modern technologies and vague legislation totally deprive Americans of privacy.
7. Modern high-tech devices make data collection very easy.
Using computers, high-tech gadgets and mountains of data, a growing army of snoops is waging an assault on Americas privacy.
It may be customary to think of threats to privacy in Orwellian terms, with an all-seeing Big Brother government as the culprit. But lately the threat comes no less from private companies, private citizens and from Americans own imperfect notions of how to define which matters are properly kept confidential. The powers of government are fashioned under the pressure of societys own values and expectations. Lately those values have been in flux.
From the quiet frontiersman to the modern urban loner, archetypal American is someone whose most sacred territory is the portable enclosure of the self. But if mind your own business has long been a prime tenet of the national philosophy, let it all hang out is now running a close second. It is hard to find a national consensus on confidentiality in a nation of tell-all memoirs, inquiring pollsters and talk shows- not to mention televised U.S. Senate hearings whose participants air explicit sexual details that would have caused earlier generations to blush and turn away.
As the bounds of privacy dissolve under demands for frankness, they also bend before the pressures for AIDS testing, drug testing, and now even genetic testing which promises to predict each persons inherited susceptibility to certain illnesses, but which could create a pariah class of persons that employers regard as too prone to cancer or other ailments.
In this volatile mix of half-formed attitudes and sharply felt anxieties, technology has arrived with a host of unprecedented temptations. Many new phone-answering machines are equipped to surreptitiously tape whole conversations. Video surveillance cameras quietly scan many workplaces. But by far the most important high-tech threat to privacy is the computer, which permits nimble feats of data manipulation, including high-speed retrieval and matching of records that were impossible with paper stored in file cabinets. As a result, it has turned data collection into a $1 billion-a-year industry- one in which nearly every American supplies the data, often without knowing it.
To get a drivers license, a mortgage or a credit card, to be admitted to a hospital or to register the warranty on a new purchase, people in U.S. routinely fill out forms providing a wealth of facts about themselves. Little of it remains confidential. Personal finances, medical history, purchasing habits and more are raked in by data companies. These firms in turn combine the records with information drawn from other sources, for instance, from state governments that sell lists of drivers licenses- to draw a clearer picture of an individual or a household.
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The repackaged data, which often include hearsay and inaccuracies, are often sold to government agencies, mortgage lenders, retailers, small businesses, marketers and insurers. When making loan decisions, banks rely on credit bureau reports about the applicants bill-paying history. Employers often refer to them in making hiring decisions. Marketers use information about buying habits and income to target their mail order and telephone pitches. Even U.S. government agencies are plugging in to commercial databases to make decisions about eligibility for health care benefits and Social Security.
Privacy watchdogs are warning that the combination of invasive technologies and lax laws threatens to make the U.S. a nation of people who live in glass houses, their every move open to scrutiny by outsiders.
Time. 2005
B. Paraphrase the underlined sentences.
C. Link the main ideas by using these words and phrases to connect similar idea:
in addition (to this fact), besides, furthermore, moreover, also, too
and these ones to connect contrasting ideas:
in contrast, on the other hand, nevertheless, conversely, but.
Add some examples and explanations from the article. That will make the summary of the text.
Render the article into English and say what you think about the future of on-line trade in Russia.
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