When I wrote Best Eaten Cold during 2016, I spend a lot of time researching ways in which an individual life could be hacked and influenced.

I started out with the ideas I had, and then tried to find real world examples to cross check the feasibility. I was amazed by how easy it was to do almost anything – however devious and intrusive – I came up with.

There were a couple of hacking techniques which I wanted to use, but which were either impossible or not documented anywhere I could see. Fortunately, the great thing about writing novels is that an absence of documented proof doesn’t need to be a stumbling block. I decided that, if they didn’t exist, they should, and included them anyway.

One example was SnapMail. From the fictional quote at the top of Chapter Three of Best Eaten Cold:

“Growing concerns about long-term privacy and the potential of personal profile damage were the main drivers behind the success of Snapchat and the various copycats which have arisen since Snapchat launched in 2011. Hackers and identity thieves have been using bespoke ‘snapmail’ software for many years. True snapmail (where all trace of a received email is removed at a fixed time after receipt or reading) can only be implemented on infiltrated email accounts.”

I invented Snapmail for my novel, but from a Guardian article of today about the closing down of Cambridge Analytica, former CEO, Alexander Nix is quoted as saying:

“No one knows we have it, and secondly we set our … emails with a self-destruct timer … So you send them and after they’ve been read, two hours later, they disappear. There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing.”

I guessed well, but apparently real-life Snapmail works without even having access to the recipient’s email account.

On a separate note, does anyone believe that a company like Cambridge Analytica is really going away, just because they’re closing the current legal entity? And was anyone that surprised about the way their Facebook data was being used in the first place?

I’ve been working on the sequel to Best Eaten Cold since the Autumn of 2017 and the Cambridge Analytica scandal is tiny when compared to what might happen …

This is the world we live in.