SAFE BY DESIGN · EPISODE 22

The Setting That Changed

Tara hadn't changed a setting. Neither had anyone else. An update had, quietly, and nobody had noticed.

Tara draws the way some people hum: constantly, mostly for herself. On Wednesday after school she was on Riya's back steps with her sketchbook. She posts her drawings to her drawing app, and back in the summer she had set her profile so only her friends could see them.

So it was strange, this afternoon, to find three follow requests from accounts she had never heard of, all liking the same sketch of the neighbour's cat.

She scrolled back through the app and found it: a cheerful note from two days ago about new ways to share her art with more people. She had tapped Got it without reading it, the way everyone does.

She took the phone inside to Riya, more puzzled than worried. “Did I change something?”

She hadn't. That turned out to be the interesting part.