CRIMEREADS: On Revenge Porn, Cyberstalking & Other Modern Privacy Problems

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.

Read the rest of the essay here.