The Takedown(41)

“SeaWorld,” I said. “Terrific.”

Mom tensed next to me. She’d surprisingly said nothing about the word on my chest, though she had given me a tissue and some serious directional eyebrows in the elevator ride up. Dad let out a weak laugh. The lawyer gave them a reassuring smile.

“I also have a teenage daughter. And yes, SeaWorld. It was a live-animal theme park.”

I laughed. “I’m not that young. I know what SeaWorld was.”

I also knew it went under when I was, like, seven, after a tech company opened up a bunch of 3-D ocean holoparks. The holoparks were expensive to build, but a lot cheaper to maintain. The boycotts over animal cruelty and the massive sea-life deaths made it harder and harder for the live-animal parks to keep stock and draw tourists, despite the fact that they’d stopped breeding orcas. And who’d want to just look at animals swimming in water when you could be “in” the water with them?

My Doc buzzed with a txt from Mom.

mama Manners. NOW.

“Good. But did you know that back in 2007,” Rick Brenner continued, unfazed, “SeaWorld began making its patrons use their fingerprints to enter the park? Initially you could present a paper ID and avoid the process, but after a few years they took that option away because hardly anyone used it except for privacy spooks. Turned out, most customers didn’t care about their data. People thought using a thumbprint for entry was easy, and even cool. The other major theme parks weren’t far behind. Other companies and venues quickly followed suit, until agreeing to give up your biometrics became a standard part of going anywhere.

“Take your local grocery store. There was a time when people clipped coupons out of the newspaper to access deals and the store had no lasting connection to you. Thus the invention of rewards cards so the store could track your purchases, fine-tune their ordering, and increase their profits. However, rewards cards were optional, and a large percentage of people chose not to sign up for them.

“Nowadays, as you know, grocery stores are automated to the degree that you cannot purchase anything in them without submitting some form of your biometrics. In trade for your personal information—including everything from what you buy to the data your Doc sends unencrypted via their Wi-Fi—the store lets you purchase food. If you don’t agree, you don’t buy food.”

I sighed loudly. I might as well have been in my New World Borders class.

Over me, Mom said, “So when my daughter signed up to be a member of YurTube, she signed away all her rights as a member.”

“Exactly. And right now, because of the unusually high quality of the forgery, the services that are hosting and profiting from the views can plausibly take the position that it is actually Kyla in the video. Because she’s a user, she’s agreed to let them use anything they can reasonably confirm as being her, even if it’s explicit in content. It’s disturbing, but per the agreement that everyone clicks through—and doesn’t read—when signing into new accounts, it’s perfectly legal. Especially since the cutoff age is only thirteen.”

“Isn’t there a way for Kyle to permanently untag herself from these videos?” Dad asked.

“Possibly,” the lawyer said, “but there was the case of Barton versus Watchyou.com. CGI is quickly becoming indistinguishable from reality. In a situation where someone wishes to untag themselves, a service might reserve the right to keep the tag, if they think that the user is untagging themselves from a tag that is accurate. Remember: these services make money from content, and if someone wants to untag themselves, it’s probably because the content is something that someone else will want to watch…which is why the services will fight any attempt at takedowns.”

“I can’t believe this is legal,” I said.

“For that, you can thank the social-media lobby. Anytime the government tries to crack down on misuse of information, the media outlets compare the situation to the censoring that China still has in place and the overturned ‘right to be forgotten’ law that the EU passed earlier in the century, and every user gets up in arms about free speech and a free web. Don’t get me wrong. A free web is primarily a good thing.”

“Except when it isn’t,” I said.

“Right,” Rick said. “You said the IP address was rerouted through GoFetch, but even if we could find the source, an injunction against the hacker would be difficult. Not only would we have to one hundred percent prove it’s him, but if the servers are out of the country, the hacker will keep putting up new copies on new servers, and by the time we stop him, well…”

“My reputation is beyond reparable. Right. Gotcha.”

Why was no one listening? I already knew this. Dad put a please cease your fire hand on my head; then his expression lit up.

“As is exceedingly evident today, our daughter’s still a minor. Can’t we go after them on child-pornography charges?”

Rick shook his head. “Since it isn’t her in the video, what this scumbag has in essence done is created virtual child pornography. While there are strict laws against child pornography, there is First Amendment protection for virtual pornography. In order for us to go after Kyla’s ‘hater’ on child-pornography charges, she’d have to say it is her in the video.”

“Ew. No way.”

“Right,” Rick said. “We could go after the hosting website to remove that content or release the user information that posted it with an implied threat to paint them as peddlers of virtual pornography based on real children. First Amendment or not, most organizations won’t want to go quite that far to defend their use of the content.”