It’s no secret the pandemic turned all our lives inside out in incalculable ways. For many of us, the norms of work and home life were shredded as those two existences merged. This was certainly true for me. Zoom meetings began to dominate my life, with their inevitable views into other people’s lives. That wasn’t all bad, I liked seeing people’s babies and pets, getting little glimpses of their apartments or backyards.
But I write thrillers and when I entered a Zoom meeting one morning to find myself facing a square featuring only an empty desk, I immediately imagined that the person for whom I was waiting was lying somewhere off screen with a knife in his belly.
My mind began to reel with ways to twist this fanciful notion into a plot device (what if I had just stumbled into the aftermath of a violent crime?), but also set me thinking about the cost of society’s current predilection for overexposure. Technology allows us to connect everywhere, all the time, and while there can be value in that, there are plenty of negatives.
I began seeing evidence of the downsides of technology’s overexposure everywhere I looked. We live in a constant cycle of gathering and sharing information. Zoom meetings may allow us to gather safely and remotely, but we all know the stories of the career-ending-never-intended-for-public-consumption-but-on-camera masturbation or explosive outburst. We’re subjected to a constant barrage of live coverage of horrific news events, from which we can hardly tear our eyes away, even while wondering at our ghoulish fascination. There are countless stories of exes cyberstalking each other on social media or of revenge porn used to dash a victim’s life against the rocks. Then there are items like the “cute” human interest feature about Alexa listening in to a household and ordering hundreds of dollars of unwanted products mentioned by a child.
As I dove deeper, I became conscious of the CCTV cameras hulking everywhere and recording our every move. Of how our every internet search is aggregated, codified and sold, causing us to leave a trail of digital fingerprints behind us that are as distinct as our actual finger pads. (We’ve all done a search for something only to find related, targeted advertising sneaking into our social feeds almost immediately thereafter.) Then there are what I call the “home stalking devices,” things like nannycams, pet-watching cameras, and the video doorbells that expose everything from thieves stealing packages to teenagers sneaking in after curfew (one could argue these latter two are benefits of spying unless you’re the thief or the teenager but it’s still a little creepy). Then I learned that even a “smart” refrigerator can be hacked to access a household’s data network. I had to wonder, is any of our information “safe?”
Next, I delved into our cultural obsession with celebrity and gossip, noting how entire empires have been built out of overexposure. Take Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian; they may be moguls now, but their careers were launched by leaked sex tapes nonetheless. Or Pamela Anderson, whose explosive sex tape with Tommy Lee is now commodified as a limited series on Hulu. Television shows like TMZ and the Real Housewives franchise have cemented gossip’s use as a currency, another truth that leads to its overexposure, whether we’re talking about celebrities or our neighbors down the cul-de-sac. Gossip is an industry. I had to wonder, does anyone know how to keep a secret anymore?
Social media and its obsession with manufactured images and filters led me to a phase of experimentation. I erased lines off my face, changed my hair color and the color of eyes, and tried on a beard. These experiments beckoned me down the crooked path of “deep fakes,” video manipulations that can make it appear that virtually anyone has said or done virtually anything. I had to wonder, is anything real anymore?
All of these musings contributed to my latest thriller, PRIVACY, (pub date June 14th, 2022). As the book began to come together in my mind I dove down one dark rabbit hole after the next. I explored identity theft, the pain that can be caused by revenge porn, the multiple downsides of social media (everything from reduced attention spans to painful FOMO, to literal tics occurring in adolescents hooked on TikTok). I learned about the differences between data privacy (your financial and medical information) and social privacy (your social media choices) and how vulnerable we all are about either being siphoned for nefarious purposes. The stories around this last arena were incredible; those catfishing for money or love often relied on fake personas crafted entirely online, including photographs of random strangers also lifted from the internet. I dug deep into these tales about scam artists who concocted false identities and used them to con others out of money, or bizarrely, just to con people seemingly for the hell of it.
I examined stalking (both cyber and real life) and how technology has contributed to making that disturbing practice easier (spyware and tracking devices are just the tip of the iceberg). I played with how the advertising on my feeds changed as result of my searches, sometimes conducting searches for random items (didgeridoo, camshaft, huckleberries) to see what those netted. As a content creator, I was horrified to learn how much online piracy costs authors and publishers, musicians and filmmakers. I was notified I was the victim of a data breach that had exposed my personal information. My husband’s tax payment was intercepted and all his information revealed (although happily, the perpetrator was caught when she tried to cash the check with “US Treasury“ whited out and replaced with her own name). I had to answer my own question: no, none of our information was safe.
Like many of us, I have an uneasy truce with what technology has wrought with respect to my privacy. I welcome the convenience of saved passwords, the video doorbell that allows me to see who’s at the door, the ability to connect with colleagues and friends around the world. But I have to admit that all this research began to make me a bit panicky, if not outright paranoid, as I realized how dangerously exposed we all are. We can’t be 100% safe if we choose to live a life online, but we can take some steps to protect ourselves. I started using DuckDuckGo as my browser because it doesn’t aggregate or sell your search information. I found myself looking up and noting the whirring cameras that canopy my city, changing the passwords on my accounts and becoming more circumspect about what I posted on social media.
Perhaps most importantly, I confirmed my commitment to myself to never, ever, ever make a sex tape. It’s not that I’m prudish, but I just don’t know if I’m ready to run the billion-dollar empire that would inevitably result.
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