Of course, most of what the government “knows” about you is “known” only in the sense that someone could get at it if they wanted to find out more about you – or if your data matched some pattern that they were investigating. So, in a sense, the data that the government collects are harmless – that is, until such information is used for a real-world purpose, such as putting people on a no-fly list or forcing into an institution someone whose online posts are “troubling.”
当然，关于政府“知道”你什么，大部分只有在某些人想了解你的更多东西时能接触这些信息时——或者在你的数据与他们正在调查的某个模式相匹配时——才会被“知道”。因此，从某种程度说，政府所收集的数据是无害的——我的意思是，在这些信息被用于真实世界目的（如将你列入禁飞名单或强迫网上所发帖子“惹麻烦”的你进局子）之前是无害的。而这只是开始。