Naked

Yes, the latest entry had me discovering the website I was looking at; it was the first thing I checked. It had logs from the web server, updating in real time, and it had stills from the camera on my laptop of me looking at the stills from the camera on my laptop on that website.

To be honest, that didn’t freak me out so much. I am a reasonably paranoid and cynical person, and somehow I’d always assumed that someone was watching what I did on the internet. when I was a new internet user, I regularly imagined someone on the other end of the connection clicking their tongue reprovingly at my choices of content, more or less as I clicked them. Now I just assumed that everything was being logged, that somewhere a record existed of everything I did online.

Mostly, I took comfort from the fact that the Internet is a big place and that my logs didn’t all exist in the same place. Recently, it’s become clear that the truth is more complicated than that, but still, I had been able to imagine that nobody had the whole picture. This website made it clear that, indeed, someone had the whole picture.

I even had an index number: 5ea75-cc9df-9a413-0098d. I guess they didn’t feel the need for a full SHA1 hash space; after all, there are only 7 billion of us. The record of my life went back all the way to the beginning, though everything from before the late eighties was obviously culled from my parents’ Facebook walls and similar sources: a picture here, a reference there, meticulously compiled but not exactly comprehensive.

But none of that was anything I couldn’t have done myself, given enough hard drive space and an obsessive need to document myself. No, the part that freaked me out and gave me little chills was the CCTV footage of me: basically every moment of my day, from leaving the house through coming home again at night, was documented minute by minute via security cameras on busses and trains, via tourist photos, via someone’s recording of a street musician (on which video I don’t appear, but on which the pattern of my footsteps had been noted and mapped).

There was a handy map with a timeline slider, so you could move the slider along and see where I was in the course of a given day; my route traced in black, documented segments solid and conjectured routes between the solid lines dotted.

My twitter feed was lighting up with the revelation of this website; it had started just after  00:00 GMT with a couple of entries of “Hey, wtf is this” and spread from there; now at 08:00 PDT I had been looking at it for an hour and the world had been looking at it for for fifteen and the outrage was building toward the extreme. Nobody knew yet who was behind the site; it seemed too well executed to be anything but an internet savvy corporate effort, having none of the clunkiness that’s the hallmark of government websites and tools, but it didn’t seem to have any footprints.

A lot of people were calling for the site to be immediately taken down, via government intervention if necessary; others were actively mirroring the data in case it should be taken down. Someone I knew had already found out who had stolen their bicycle by tracing back through their timeline and doing a “see who else was here” search, another handy function.

I sipped my coffee and watched myself, two days ago, take a deliberate detour on my way to work, stop outside my ex-girlfriend’s house, stare up at her window for two or three minutes, then keep walking. I had forgotten I had done that. I wondered what else I had done that was now out there, for everyone to see.

I flipped the laptop shut and took a shower, wondering if a neighbor was recording their kid’s birthday morning and inadvertently saving the sound of the shower on the audio track; I thought about the correlation between that hypothetical audio and water usage via my internet-connected water meter.

There would, I thought, be a way to figure out, from stray audio and water usage and who knew what other bits of information floating around, whether I jerked one off in the shower before work.

And it would be different, this morning; everything before about fifteen hours ago, there would be a pass on... you didn’t know you were being recorded, hadn’t realized you were in public. But this morning... if you weren’t thinking about what you were doing, about who was watching and... you were doing it in public, and the rules of being in public applied. People I knew would think worse of me for jerking off in the shower, not because I had done it, but because I had done it in public. By this new definition of public.

I turned the shower off and stepped out of the shower stall, naked and wet, into the new world.