AI-powered Flock cameras are blanketing the country. Data brokers are selling veritable dossiers worth of information on everyone to shady government agencies. And your neighbors are all spying on each other, unintentionally or otherwise, with their doorbell cameras.
All this is a nightmare for any of us that care about our privacy, sure. But it’s also quite the headache for crime novelists.
Gone are the days that a fictional criminal could don a mustache and wig to get away with murder. Or wipe the gun they just used to shoot someone and plant it to make it look like a suicide.
To keep their stories grounded, writers of crime fiction have to keep up with the surveillance tech of the times almost as much as an actual master criminal might. If they don’t account for the omnipresence of modern surveillance, they’ve lost their audience.
