Kill Process (4 page)

I once remarked to a friend that the cost of building homes for the homeless would be cheaper than dealing with the social impact of homelessness. She said lacking a home was the symptom of homelessness, and the causes went far deeper: mental problems, substance abuse issues, social support. What seemed like a simple problem was quite complex.

In this moment of hesitation, I’m overwhelmed by the complexity of my issues. Having one hand is nothing at all compared to the warring factions inside my mind: Sit at the table to show you care. Don’t let anyone between you and the exit.

I’m a woman in tech, an amputee, an abuse survivor. The intersectionality kills me.

Carl, a senior marketing manager, looks up at me from his corner seat at the front of the table. Maybe I’ve gone pale, or perhaps he notices my shaking. He stands and moves his stuff. “I’m going to be presenting, Angie. Take my seat.”

Carl may be a good guy despite his career choice.

“Thanks,” I mumble, and slip into the chair as unobtrusively as possible. I’m embarrassed and thankful. I wipe a fine sheen of sweat from my forehead, and avoid looking at anyone at the table. I can’t avoid the gaze of my boss, Daniel, directly across and clueless of what transpired. He’s probably still wondering why I was pissed about the maternity leave party.

Down the table, three other people from marketing are present, along with a designer and two UI engineers, including Sarah, the technical lead for our new web browser. There’s no one from backend engineering except me. Tomo as a company thinks first and foremost about how things look. That I’m present at this meeting is only because I’ve spent the last two years indoctrinating Daniel into the importance of involving all the stakeholders. I hate these meetings, yet being here seems to be the only way to ward off the worst of the stupid technical decisions.

One last person enters and Carl nods to them.

“Let’s get started, everyone,” Carl says, and thumbs through slides on his phone, which are displayed on the wall behind him. “One of our top user complaints is about privacy.” The slide contains a pie chart of customer issues. “The number one complaint is concern over who can view their posts, followed closely by concern over the use of their personal data for advertising.”

Carl is stating the obvious to anyone who works in social networking. Advertising is how Tomo makes nearly all of its revenue, and those dollars are dependent on accurately targeting users.

Usually this is good. If the band The Strokes tours the country and wants to advertise tickets to fans who live in Sacramento, California, they can do it with Tomo. Their fans perceive it as a feature, not advertising. I’ve read feedback from users who said “I love Tomo’s concert alerts!” when we have no such alerts. The band pays two bucks a click to place those ads in front of their fans. Two dollars to sell a forty-dollar ticket is good business all around.

On the other hand, hyper-personalized advertising has its drawbacks. When a teen researches birth-control or pregnancy or other sensitive topics, and related ads follow her around the Internet, her friends and parents will spot it sooner or later.

What users hate most is that both Tomo and our corporate partners profit off the information they share: once we sell personalized advertising, and again when that advertising manipulates them into spending money and making decisions they wouldn’t have otherwise.

People like to believe they own the space inside their own minds, but the reality is it’s all rented away to the highest bidder, bit by bit, every time they’re exposed to another piece of planted information.

I’m daydreaming while Carl rambles, until he startles me with an unexpected turn of direction.

“We’re going to market privacy to our users with a new product,
PrivacyGuard: Protect yourself and your family
.” Carl grins like a cat with two mice. “Not only will we address our number one customer issue, we also create a new source of revenue. Mike, can you explain the details?”

One of Carl’s marketing flacks gets up. “We eliminate personalized advertising. Zero, zip, zilch. No use of customer data to run ads targeted at them. Of course, that’s only half the picture. Nobody is going to pay for that. We also guarantee their personal data does not appear anywhere on the Internet.”

I literally feel my eyes squinting as I stare at him. Does he understand how the Internet works? We don’t control it. Nobody controls it.

He sees me staring and pointedly looks away to scan the rest of the audience. “With our total access to all user data, we can scan the Internet for any occurrences of the user’s personal data. We then opaque that information, so no one can access it.”

Sarah, the browser technical lead, nods brightly, and it’s obvious she knows what they’re talking about. It takes me a long time to connect the dots to Sarah’s involvement because the idea is so monumentally stupid I must undo everything I know about technology and see it from their perspective.

Finally it hits me. We introduced our own web browser six months ago, and it’s slowly been winning users, eating away at Avogadro’s market share. Now our browser is responsible for almost a quarter of all web page views. They want to hide the data in our browser.

“Just because you’re not showing the user their data,” I say, “doesn’t mean it’s removed from the Internet. You’re not removing the data, you’re lying to the user and pretending it’s not there.”

“It’s better than removing it from one site at a time.” Sarah glares at me even as she keeps her voice light. “We make sure no one can see the private data, regardless of where it is. We find it, we blacklist it, and the Tomo browser won’t display it. We’ve got two dozen patent applications in the works already.”

“Carl, Daniel, this is insane,” I say. “Please. We’re providing the illusion of privacy, not real help. If someone looks at this, they’ll believe their information is secure, but if anyone switches browsers, it’ll be right there.”

“Privacy is the
feeling
of being secure and comfortable,” Carl says. “We can give them that feeling, and that’s what’s important.”

I take back what I said about Carl being a good guy. Oh, maybe he is, one-on-one, but somehow companies turn employees into monsters who exploit anyone and everyone to make the next billion dollars.

“You expect customers to pay for this?” I ask. Some people count to ten to calm their emotions. I count off ten ways I could kill Carl. Number nine is an ax to the forehead, which is ridiculous, because axes are unwieldy with one arm, but I like the image of his skull cloven in two. I clench and release my fist.

Carl nods. “We’ll double revenue for privacy customers.
PrivacyGuard
will cost $9.95 per year. We’ve already done user testing of the price point.”

I glance around the room. Does anyone really believe this nonsense? No one trusts us. That’s the problem.
Oy vey
. Half the people in the room harbor dreamy eyes at the idea of increasing user revenue.

“Our annual advertising revenue is currently eight bucks per user,” I say. “Double would be sixteen bucks, not ten.”

“Well . . .” Carl gestures to his marketing flack, who chuckles.

“Privacy lovers enjoy thirty percent more discretionary income. There’s a slew of companies wanting to advertise specifically to people who want more privacy.”

My head pounds, and I experience phantom itches in my missing hand. “You said no personalized advertising. ‘Zero, zip, zilch’ were your exact words.”

“Right. Well, there’s no personalized data. However, the lack of personalized data
is
data. Data indicating a user who values privacy.”

Carl chuckles. “We win on both ends, Angie. It’s great. We’re going to make the company a fortune and make our users happy.”

The other people in the room laugh along with Carl.

I’m thinking an ice pick. Can’t they see how bad this idea is? Anyone who cares one iota about finding information will pick a web browser other than Tomo. The barrier to entry is as simple as installing an app.

For a very brief moment my heart surged at the thought that Tomo was actually going to make a meaningful contribution to privacy.

Now I shake my head and fight off the urge to vomit. Corporations are disgusting beasts.

Believe me, the irony of my position is not lost on me. Here I am, complaining about how we’re treating people’s privacy, and yet I’m invading people’s privacy up the wazoo. But I do it to do good.

*     *     *

I wake up, sweating, my ears ringing and blood pounding. I’m twisted up in the sheets and my throat is sore, like I’ve been screaming, which I probably was.

For a moment I’m too panicked to move, trying to remember exactly where I am. I’m in my condo. The bed next to me is empty, Thomas at his own place. I glance in the darkness at the walls, think about the people in neighboring units. Do they hear me scream in the middle of the night? How can they not?

I walk to the bathroom, drink a glass of water, and return to lie down on the other side of the bed where it’s not so sweaty and damp.

After my . . . accident, I spent six months in rehab, learning to write again, tie my shoes, and everything else I needed to do one-handed. Then I went back to work. It’s hard enough to walk into the same office, see the same coworkers, without an arm. Harder still when everyone looks at you and sees a woman who killed her husband.

My old boss understood right away and offered me a job in the Portland office if I wanted it. I took the job, moved in the fall and immediately bought a house, a classic Four Square, the quintessential Portland home, with grassy yard and a huge maple tree. Two weeks after I moved in, the leaves fell, then it rained.

You
can
rake leaves one-armed. You can do pretty much anything one-armed, even put a watch on if you use your teeth. You can cut a steak and cut your fingernails, because they’ve got great adaptive tools. However, some difficult things hold almost no reward. After eight hours hard labor and only a fraction of the wet, heavy leaves in bags, I went into the house and cried myself to sleep.

The next morning, I briefly considered hiring a yard maintenance service. That’s what any of my old coworkers in the Bay Area would have done. Somehow I can’t stomach the idea of hiring someone to do what I can’t do. I don’t know why. Maybe because my mother believed you should do your maintenance and wasn’t above taking a wrench to the plumbing if the super didn’t show up when he was supposed to. Watching someone else mow my lawn and rake my leaves would be an ever-present mental sore reminding me of what I can’t do.

Before lunch, I called my real estate agent. The house was sold before I’d even made the first mortgage payment. I’ve been in this condo since.

A burst of shame leaves my face burning. What do the neighbors think? These aren’t whimpers in the night. I scream loud. The last thing I want is to explain my nightmares to anyone, but why doesn’t anyone ever ask if I’m okay?

F
RIDAY MORNING
,
Thomas calls to make dinner plans and ask if he can stay the night. We decide on Japanese food and I agree he can stay over.

A few years ago, I had several disastrous attempts at dating at Emily’s insistence, events which inevitably aborted early after panic attacks. Thomas was different. He never pushed, never made a move that surprised or threatened me. He was simply there. He made me laugh even though my teeth were gritted in fear. We’ve gradually inched closer together, and now, two years later, part of me yearns to marry him.

No matter how badly I’ve suffered, the need to be hugged and loved never goes away. That he can manage to fit himself into my jigsaw puzzle of mental issues and myriad oddities makes him all the more precious.

It’s impossible for us to become closer, let alone get married. I can’t ever explain what I’ve done. What I continue to do. There are people out there ruining other people’s lives. I must stop them.

How would I account for the long road trips? The strange outings in the middle of the night. The weird computer hardware. My secret office.

He has to stay where he is, a carefully controlled distance away. This tears at me. There must be limits to his patience, and I dread crossing that unknown line and losing him.

*     *     *

We travel to Alberta Street in northeast Portland. I let Thomas drive. He bought a new Audi this week, and his grin is as wide as his face.

I sit in the passenger seat and take long, slow breaths. Even the slight loss of control of being the passenger brings on anxiety. I’ll cope for his sake.

At the restaurant, a hip new place, we split a small bottle of sake and order omakase, chef’s choice. After I finish my first thimble of sake, the rage at PrivacyGuard resurfaces.

“Do you understand? That they’re actually making privacy worse, by hiding the data from the owners, while it’s still out there for anyone with the know-how to download an alternate browser?”

“I get it,” Thomas says, a slight smile crossing his face. “The question is, what are you going to do about it?”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you.”

“I’m only an engineer. I can’t stop this.” Thomas runs his own company, a law practice specializing in intellectual property. He’s forgotten how hard it is when you’re not totally in charge, when it takes months of lobbying to affect even a small change, the way big organizations build up the momentum of bad ideas until they’re impossible to stop and no one even remembers where the concept came from.

“You’re their data goddess. They idolize your every word.”

“No, they humor my every word, because I single-handedly improved ad targeting enough to increase company revenue 12 percent.”

He glances at my stump.

“Yeah, I do everything single-handedly.”

“Can you talk to your boss?”

“Daniel?” I don’t bother to hide my snicker. “He has no backbone. He’ll kowtow to Carl all day long.”

“Then go to Carl.”

“Carl cares about the bottom line. He sees a way to boost revenue per user.” Thomas doesn’t even know I was once Tomo’s chief database architect, that I reported to our CTO. I set the ground rule early on that I would never talk about the past, and he would never ask about it. Why don’t I go back to the CTO? I’m hesitant, and I wonder whether he sent me off to Portland to protect me or because he was embarrassed by me.