“What’s that?” I asked, with a probably obvious edge of girl-on-girl judgment in my voice, and pointed to a distracting flaw in a photo of my boyfriend’s sister.
He – older, amiable, a nerd – had built an app. And in a message he’d just pulled up on his laptop, his sorority-president sister was agreeing to market it to her friends. But all I could focus on was her picture... a dime-sized image with her laptop open in the background. And stuck over the top of her laptop screen was an electric pink rectangle that, to my eye, did not belong. (Persnickety as this sounds, the line and color of an open MacBook are so central to the landscape of modern student life that the least aberration jars the senses.) He, an NSA coder after college, said it was a Band-Aid – and apparently one from the neon line. It was the latest craze, he told me, covering your computer’s built-in webcam to shut out the hackers who might otherwise watch you working, online shopping, or moving idly around your room. These hackers, he said, could disable the green light that usually comes on when the camera is “live.” You’d never know if someone was watching. They might have been watching us then, in fact, because his webcam wasn’t covered. He said he wasn’t worried – women are likelier targets, for one thing. The digital voyeur
pays many times more for stolen shots of women than men (unless they’re men worth blackmailing). Plus, if he were going to be hacked, he insinuated his hard drive had more valuable cargo than footage of the two of us innocently alone together. At least the webcam spies knew my value. For a woman, participating in the webcam privacy panic requires a self-conscious spark: I, too, am a profitable target. To my knowledge, I’d never had a true stalker follow me home and watch me through my lighted windows. But suddenly I had license to believe there could be thousands of watchers whenever I was in front of my open laptop – which was most of the time – more time than I’m visible through my actual windows. And these webcam hackers had all their paying customers too... I imagined them peering into my private moments from deep within a Bond-villain base of operations, buried in a cave network in the foothills of some Central Asian mountain chain. Screen after screen of little windows stacked Brady-Bunch-style, each opening into another flickering world full of mundane secrets like mine. Someone could be trading bitcoin for a livestream of me, studying.
66 March 2018
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