The political consulting firm had come to her. In a roundabout way. Not directly, they never did anything directly, but she was pretty sure she knew who they were. Someone had developed a profiling system using general online information – social media ‘likes’ and smartphone data. Margaret was told none of this outright, but she’d found it out by asking around. She was told they wanted an app that could collect people’s data. This was not an unusual request – it was pretty much using the social media platform as it was set up to be used – for advertising. She’d done it a million times before. What did not sit well with her was a sentence, nested in the message, that said the consultancy were pretty sure there was a way to harvest not only the data of the person who used the app but also of their online networks. The sentence was cleverly constructed. It said a lot more than the words it was made up of, but only a few people would understand this second, coded meaning. It was asking for a decision – are you with us or against us? If Margaret was against them, if she said anything about it, they would be able to quote the text back as it was written, and it would mean what the words said, and she would look like she was overreacting and a bit paranoid. But what they were asking for didn’t seem right. No one read the terms and conditions and that was their fault, but she couldn’t quite justify it. The contractor had wanted to talk to her on the phone. She said she didn’t want to, but they’d insisted, and she had an uncomfortable conversation where it felt like she just said no, over and over, for an hour. Until she said she didn’t have time and there was only one of her. She couldn’t get it done for them on time.

The contractor followed up the phone call with a message saying that by agreeing to the phone call she’d implicitly signed a disclosure sanction. She wrote back and said she understood, and they knew she did. ‘What you see is what you get with Margaret,’ a guy had said at a meeting once, and everyone nodded, and she realised none of them had any idea. What they saw was what they wanted to get.