The social networking company had been stealing data from people for years, but they were finally ordered to give it back to any user that requested it after years of court battles. Few people understood exactly what the court order meant and fewer still took the company up on their offer of returned data. But still some people did and the company needed a method for doing so.
Jennifer Kim was among the first to request her data back. The company was ill-prepared. They had countless Jennifer Kims in their database; they just needed her to go away -- so they hooked her up to the machine that would return her data to her, and told her to sit still.
Instead of returning her data to her, they picked a carefully selected alternate user instead. Jennifer would obtain the memories, personality, full data file, and (most importantly) the lax attitude of data security of user “Steve Johnson.” Sure, it would be like creating a second Steve Johnson inside Jennifer Kim’s body, and that might be a problem. But, according to the data, the company suspected the new Steve probably wouldn’t care. The company was rarely wrong with the way they interpreted the data.
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