Kill Process by William Hertling Read Free Book Online Page A

many complications.
    I switch over to the clerk’s email account, and compare the inbox to the sent folder to see how long it usually takes between the time he emails her and the time she normally replies with the patient data. It’s anywhere between five and thirty minutes.
    I track the doctor’s location on a map, his geocoordinates still streaming in every fifteen seconds over the connection. He’s on the ninth hole when the receptionist gets into work. When he gets to the sixteenth hole, I upload a server-side rule for the receptionist’s email, temporarily shunting all incoming emails except the ones from the good doctor into a folder. I want to make sure that when his email arrives, it’s the only one she’s looking at.
    When he gets to the eighteenth hole, I turn on his microphone, and listen to him talking to someone, I assume his golf partner. The sound is muted, as you’d expect from someone carrying their phone in their pants pocket. I happen to know it’s his left-front pocket.
    It sounds crazy I can ascertain this from the motion data of a phone, but I’ve got acceleration details from one billion people, 365 days a year, for dozens of sit/stand events per day, and from this mass of data points I can tell you with 90 percent reliability whether a person keeps their phone in a pant pocket, jacket pocket, or purse, and if it’s a pocket, whether it’s the left or right, front or back.
    I had to be sure of my accuracy, so I wrote a predictive algorithm, and tested it by turning on the camera, so I could capture video of the phone being extracted. From these videos, I figured out how often the algorithm was correct.
    I didn’t do this research because I suffer from an OCD disorder when it comes to analyzing data, although that helps. This was an actual client request from advertisers who wanted to target ads based on where a woman carried her cell phone. I won’t go into the research I did to segment users based on bathroom paint color.
    If this sounds intrusive, you’re right. If you think Tomo users should cancel their account, you’re also right. They won’t, because for many of them, we hold hostage their primary, or perhaps only, connection to their friends.
    More and more, I see parallels between Tomo and the assholes I choose to eliminate. Abusers remove any sense of self-control from their victims by wielding absolute power over their lives, removing any privacy or ability to have a life apart. Every user of Tomo experiences same situation, albeit to a different degree: no privacy, no life apart from Tomo, and no ability to leave without forfeiting their social connections. Few recognize the parallels, but I do, and it makes me increasingly ill.
    The dot on the screen moves. Focus, Angie.
    The doctor approaches the club house, my cue to act. I use my backdoor into the Tomo app to send a personal email from his phone to the medical clerk. The messages requests the pacemaker model, device ID, install date, and date of last checkup for Erik Copley. All I really need is the device ID. The rest is there to lend credibility.
    I bite my fingernails when the doc stops to talk to someone. I’m counting on him heading into what I assume to be the locker room. My geospatial data is less accurate once he’s inside. Historically there’s a stationary period of thirty to forty minutes after he finishes golf. My guess is he leaves the phone in his locker while he works out, and that’s ideal in case the receptionist calls for more information.
    The delay is only a minute or two. In another window, I’m tracking the clerk’s inbox. She’s opened the email.
    Finally the doctor gets back in motion, and a minute later the accelerometer records the sharp impact of a hard surface. He’s laid the phone down. I listen through the microphone and hear only muted sounds. I jump out of my seat when the phone rings, even though I was half expecting it. Channeling through my backdoor in the Tomo app, I check the