Project SEEN — Journal
In the final stages of crafting this project, I remembered I wanted to get a proper email contact just for it. I went to gmail, old reliable for me, and I tried to find something simple like "project.seen@gmail.com", but that was unavailable so I tacked on "26" and thought I could just play it off as the year the project launched because I couldn't think of anything else at the moment. Something new happened while creating this account that I'd never seen before, Google asked me to scan a QR code to "verify" I wasn't a bot, but I thought little of it, I chalked it up to my careful browsing upsetting a corporation that famously stalks cookies, and regardless the page clearly stated "Scanning the QR code won’t associate your device or phone number with the new Google Account."
Back to the email, I can get quite anal about design, I know when something's off and detracts a user, and "project.seen26@gmail.com" was simply hideous, and I thought on it a little bit harder and thought: of course, "project.seen.artist" will do. You can't change email names once you set them, so I quickly deleted that email and tried a new one. Before I could register the new one, Google asked me to scan the QR code again, and this time it essentially said "You already used this phone number to create an account; use another account." So that was a fucking lie; they immediately stored my phone number, and days later I still cannot make an account. Obviously I do not have two phone numbers. I think I'll never use gmail again. Astute people in the audience have noticed I had to use a different email in the end.
Here's the thing though. It's not really that Google lied, or at least, that's not the interesting part. It's what they lied about. They told me, in writing, on the page, that scanning the QR code would not associate my device or phone number with the account. Literal minutes later that same phone number blocked me from making a second one. Nobody asked me if they could keep it, I didn't check a box, I didn't even type it into a field and hit submit. It was just retained, quietly, the moment I scanned a code that promised the opposite, and there was no moment in that entire process where I consented to anything. That's the part that sits wrong with me. Not the lie itself, but the fact that the lie was covering for something that would have happened either way. Whether they told me the truth or not, my number was getting stored. The honesty was never actually on the table. Only the wording was.
And once I sat with that, it stopped feeling like a story about one bad email signup and started feeling like the smallest possible example of something much bigger. Because think about how much of this happens to you without a QR code, without a page of fine print, without even the theater of being asked. You walk down a street you've walked a hundred times, and a doorbell camera bolted to somebody else's house catches your face, timestamps it, keeps it. You didn't ring that bell. You don't even know whose house it is. You'll never know it happened. Somewhere, on a hard drive that belongs to a company you've never done business with, there's a frame of you existing, filed away, and you had no say in it whatsoever, because the moment you're visible at all, you're eligible.
Or there's your phone, since every phone pings a cell tower every few seconds so it can do the extremely basic job of receiving calls and texts. That's it, that's the whole crime. And that ping is a location, and that location is a data point, and that data point is worth money to someone, so it gets sold, not because you did anything, not because you opted in, but because existing with a phone in your pocket generates a byproduct, and all byproducts get monetized. Nobody sat you down and explained this. There was no consent screen for "the simple act of your phone functioning as a phone.", it's just ambient now. It's the water.
That's what I mean when I say there's no clean version of this where you opt out. It's not that the terms are bad, or that the checkbox is sneaky, or that you should have read the fine print more carefully. It's that entire categories of surveillance don't route through consent at all. They route through simply existing in public, or simply owning a device, or, apparently, simply scanning a QR code that swears it won't do the thing it's already doing. You don't get asked. You get logged.
And even in the one case where you do catch it red-handed, like I did, nothing happens. Nobody's fired over a phone number that got stored against its own stated policy. No fine lands on Google's desk because of my Gmail account. They don't even have to admit it. I just quietly can't make a second email address, and that's the entire consequence, for them and for me, and I'm one of the lucky ones because I noticed at all.
So that's the water I'm trying to build one small dry spot inside of. This app doesn't ask for your name, it doesn't ask for your phone number, your location, your face, or anything that could tie what you send back to you specifically, outside of the fact that you're the one who installed it. There's no account to make, no login to leak, no profile being built up quietly in the background so it can be sold off or subpoenaed or scraped by something else entirely. What gets sent, gets sent anonymously to me, and only me, and I have no interest in figuring out who you are. I don't want your identity. I want the thing you'd never post, for the ten seconds it takes me to actually look at it, and then I'll move on.
That's the whole trade. Not "give us your data and we'll give you a service," which is every other terms-of-service on the internet, and not pennies thrown at you by the file the way an advertiser pays for your data. You give information, I give attention. TThat's the whole exchange, and it's small enough and strange enough that it almost starts to feel like two people talking again, instead of a person and a corporation. Just: be seen, briefly, by one person who isn't logging who you are, and then go back to being unseen, which, after all of this, might be the safest thing left to be.