The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing—Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all. What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users’ friendships and social lives.

    Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s enemies are currently plotting? It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops it owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

    Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. The users of their services are not their customers. That would be the people who buy advertising from them—and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.

    The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

答案精析：根据题干中的Linking phone numbers to Facebook identities可定位至第二段第一句。此句和之后的句子提到，Facebook违背了不将电话号码和用户身份绑定的约定，其结果是尽管不知道信息的内容，但也能知道是谁在向谁发送信息（who sent them and to whom），这在很大程度上泄露了信息。由此可知，泄露信息对Facebook用户造成风险，故选C项。

错项排除：选项A是对第二段第三句话的过度推理，此句中提到，哪个政治记者会不想知道特蕾莎·梅的政敌们正在WhatsApp的组件构成中谋划着什么呢？但并没有说此举会恶化政治争端，A错。选项B是根据第二段最后一句设置的干扰项，但此句只是说明亚马逊对“全食”超市（Whole Foods）客户的购买记录感兴趣，并未提及要对其扰乱，故排除B项。第二段第一句话中出现European commission，此句只是说Facebook违背了和欧盟委员会的约定，故排除D项。