Dot matrix

A woman goes to work, to school, to dentist, grocery store and church. She takes her kids to lessons, calls her parents from the waiting room or her sister from the car. On the side she's filming documentaries on the homeless, sending screenplay rewrites to an LA producer. Her husband stirs the soup and shovels snow or paints the house.

In a non flick of the keyboard, her life is changed. An email she's about to delete stops her cold. I'm watching you is the subject; she starts to read, prepared to sift through bogus hype and a link she won't pursue. Instead, the sender is uncannily acquainted with her life, noting every detail. For however long it takes to read the swimming text, she does not breathe. When a parched white rasp escapes her throat, her eyelids pinch to black denial. How long? How much? How possible? How wrong... how... wrong... how...

"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about."