Privacy for me but not for thee

That same Friday night, Stacey had joined her family for dinner. She wasn’t sure what the point was of eating her food together with the rest of the family. She liked to get out of her room, it was one of the few reasons she still had to leave her room and get dressed for a bit. But her family mostly ignored her at this point during dinner. It was as if they pretended that she simply wasn’t there. At first she had felt upset about it, and to a certain extent she still was. However, she had also reasoned that her family also had to get used to the idea of her not being around anymore, and that this was simply their way of doing it.

“Son,“ her father started a new conversation, “you’re doing some kind of technical engineering bachelor right now, right? Something combined with computers?”

“Yes dad, it’s called Computer Science, why?”, Stacey’s brother said.

“I was wondering”, her father said, “we now have a camera downstairs that captures everything we do in the living room, and we can turn it on or off depending on if we want it to record or not.”

Stacey stopped eating right that instant. She wanted to be able to follow this conversation for 100%, even if she wasn’t included in the conversation.

“Yeah, so?”, Stacey’s brother asked.

“Well, I still don’t like that it captures all of us, instead of just Stacey. And it has happened multiple times that we either forgot to turn it on when Stacey came downstairs, or that we forgot to turn it off when she went upstairs again. The fact that Stacey has decided to give up her privacy doesn’t mean that we should do so too. Can’t you make it so that it will only record Stacey?”

“Oh sure dad. I think it should be possible. I can redirect the IP stream, and then use image recognition to …”, Stacey’s brother said.

“That’s great son. I’d like to have it rather sooner than later”, Stacey’s father interrupted him, clearly not interested in the technical details that he wouldn’t understand anyways.

With that, Stacey’s brother went upstairs to start his new project.

The rest of the family left the table shortly after and Stacey helped putting the dishes in the dishwasher.

“What are you doing?!”, her mother asked.

“Helping doing the dishes?”, Stacey said. Not sure what the problem was, but sensing that their might be some sort of problem.

“I’m sure you’re simply trying to delay getting naked again.“, her mom said.

“No I’m not!”, was all that Stacey could say.

“I’ll believe it if you give me that t-shirt of yours right this instant.”

Stacey looked at her mom, she was being dead-serious. Then she looked at her shirt. It was the only piece of clothing she was wearing. Ever since she spent most of the time naked in her room she had only put her long t-shirt on to go downstairs.

She was speaking the truth, it hadn’t really occurred to her that she was delaying getting naked by helping to do the dishes. Defeated she looked at her shirt, and took it off.

“Thanks. I’ll think I keep that”, her mom said.

Only seconds after she had taken her shirt off in the kitchen, Stacey saw her sister walk into the kitchen.

“Nice outfit sis!” she said, “Even though you always pretend to be so modest I have always known you were a real slut down deep inside”

That was it. Stacey couldn’t stand her sister any longer and yelled every curse word that she could think of in the direction of her sister.

Her sister was clearly shaken, she had never seen Stacey so angry and never thought her capable of it.

“That’s enough!” her mom yelled “No more clothes for you!”, she said while looking at Stacey. “This other girl is also naked 24/7. And we tried to be a bit lenient for you, but if this is the way you’re going to behave then there’s no more leniency for you, young lady!”

Stacey looked angrily at her sister. She blamed her sister for the fact that she was naked now for all her family to see. Not just through the cameras, but also face to face. But there was nothing she could do about it now.

She quickly ran upstairs. Every time she thought it couldn’t become worse, it did. At this point she became a little scared about what would be next.