#also me: he installed an invisible camera and i will never have privacy again i never had privacy in the first place

[missjessefantastico]

i had never understood the toxic in toxic person so much

[uselessnocturnal]

For Your Eyes Only

olivarry week 2018 | day one | supernatural

summary; Oliver’s dishes are pristinely positioned in a neat pile on the counter beside the sink. There’s actual food in the fridge. Not the five minute plastic microwavable food but proper ham and cheese sandwiches (his favourite kind) that someone has premade. His clothes are folded corner to corner arranged by colour in his drawers and he knows for a fact he hadn’t done that. Hell, he hadn’t even washed them.

“Maybe it’s a ghost,” Thea jokes, “you could do with some friends…even if they might be dead.”

Oliver shoots her the classic eyebrow raised, unamused expression and holds back a sigh, “Thanks, Speedy, but ghosts don’t exist.”

-

Upon Oliver’s return from the dead after five years on Lian Yu, he buys an apartment to hide from his family and friends. Maybe it’s luck but it just so happens that this particular flat is haunted by his very own Barry the Friendly Ghost

notes; This is the first time I've participated in olivarry week and I'm already a couple of hours late oops. The fic doesn't exactly follow season one of Arrow. Generally Barry can touch anything if he thinks about it, so if something is thrown at him suddenly, it'll go straight through him (unless he's in a physical form) idk just give me the benefit of the doubt please. Hope you enjoy!

read on ao3 here

Oliver’s sparse dishes are pristinely positioned in a neat pile on the counter beside the sink. There’s actual food in the fridge. Not the five minute plastic microwavable food but proper smoked salmon sandwiches (his favourite kind – a luxury he couldn’t enjoy on Lian Yu) that someone has premade. His clothes are folded corner to corner in his drawers (boxers left untouched and sprawled around his underwear drawer, he notes)

At first he figured he must have been so exhausted from running around in a green hood that he must have forgotten he’d done it. Ridiculous considering Oliver really isn’t that meticulous. Then he decided Moira must’ve hired a housekeeper for him – someone to keep an eye on him. Oliver nearly rolls his eyes at the thought, it sounded like something that his mother would do; pretend to understand Oliver’s request for privacy and yet send someone to be his hidden babysitter. He was just lucky he kept his operation away from home.

When he confronts Thea about it in Verdant, she insists that No, Mom hasn’t sent anyone – though their mother had been tempted to install security cameras to which Walter had thankfully steered her away from.

“Maybe it’s a ghost,” Thea jokes, sliding her finger along the rim of her pomegranate martini, “you could do with some friends…even if they might be dead.” 

Oliver shoots her the Queen classic eyebrow raised, unamused expression and holds back a sigh, “Thanks, Speedy, but ghosts don’t exist.”

She gives a cryptic shrug, “Your flat is clean, you never see who does it, and there’s nothing on the security cameras you installed.” He rolls his eyes what kind of person did you think he was not to install cameras.

“Face it, Ollie, you’re being haunted.”

It’s almost stupid that, as he rides his motorbike back to his flat, he actually considers Thea’s suggestion. He knows she was joking – there was no way she believed in ghosts. Not unless she’d seen what he had lived on the island.

As time passes, as more dishes are done, more meals prepared and Oliver is sure no one else has been in his flat, he finds himself mumbling quiet thanks to the air. Sure, it feels a bit idiotic at first but if there were someone with him, they at least deserve some appreciation, especially since sometimes he finds his bloodied Hood suit cleaned and returned to its hiding spot without any officers crashing down his doors. Unless he wanted to be thrown into Arkham Asylum, there wasn’t much to say about the situation to anyone else. Besides, it’s not like he doesn’t need the extra help.

Barry can barely believe it. Oliver-Freaking-Queen is living in his apartment. A man – who basically came back from the dead – is now living in Barry’s apartment. Well, technically it’s Oliver’s apartment since Barry’s dead but it wasn’t like Barry could leave the area anyway 

He hadn’t left the confines of these same dull walls in…he couldn’t exactly remember when he died. Or where he died. He couldn’t remember anything about his death for that matter. Not much stuck in his head from his life either.

When he’d first found himself in the bare apartment in a panic all he knew was his name. Over time, though, bits and pieces had been coming back in fragments. My name is Barry Allen. When I was eleven years old, my mother was murdered and my father was arrested (or framed). I moved in with Joe and Iris. She was my best friend and she had brown eyes and a nice smile and was…was…

It was a mantra he had recited almost every day since he had died and memories started returning. His recollection would only go so far and sometimes he’d find himself struggling to remember things like his parents’ names, the sound of Joe’s voice or even what he himself looked like. Up until the return of Oliver Queen, Barry had led a lonely existence.

Somehow, as soon as Oliver stepped foot into the apartment, Barry just knew instantly who he was to the public. The Queen’s Gambit…no survivors…Oliver Queen…billionaire…presumed dead… The fact that he was back after five years amazed Barry. It was impossible to come back from the dead as far as he knew. Yet, Barry found himself believing the impossible a lot more easily than he had thought he would.

And so, with this newfound fascination in the man who had strengthened his belief, Barry Allen helped Oliver Queen with the housework. He hadn’t been completely sure of his ghostly capabilities but as of right now, he knows that he can move small objects without much difficulty and, unless he concentrated, he was invisible to the rest of the world (and all he could really do was flicker in front of the mirror for a couple of seconds).

Ghosts didn’t sleep much but Barry liked to give his roommate privacy, taking the time to wander around the apartment for the hundredth time that day. He learned a lot from cleaning the flat whenever he was out. Oliver still has plenty of suits that he wears to visit his sister and turns up at Queen Consolidated in. Oliver Queen is a vigilante that murders (if Barry ever spoke to Oliver, oh, he would have a word). Oliver doesn’t watch movies much but he does sometimes like to quietly play 80s music. There’s never anyone else in the house and he only occasionally goes out to actually meet his family.

Oliver Queen is lonely. And maybe he’d like a friend.

Even if potential friend is meant to be dead and has been through Oliver’s underwear drawer before.

It was Barry’s idea to start leaving notes. Knowing that Oliver felt ridiculous talking to himself, he figured they might as well start communicating and confirm Barry’s existence. It’s almost the biggest decision he’s ever made (it definitely is in this part of his afterlife anyway). Why risk this relationship for scaring Oliver off because his apartment is haunted? Barry doesn’t want to be alone again. But he also wants to actually communicate with man he lives with.

His gaze lingers on the doorway where he’s sure Oliver is about to return from lunch with Thea any moment now and flickers back to the paper on the table and the pen wavering in his hand. Footsteps that are distinctly Oliver’s echo in the hallway and Barry panics and settle on a simple scrawl

Hi :)

He wants to take back the smiley face almost immediately but Oliver strides into the room and Barry steps away from the table like a guilty child even though he knows in his heart that Oliver can’t even see him.

For his part, Oliver – hyperaware of his surroundings as always – notices the yellow sticky note immediately and picks it up, letting a small smile grace his face. Barry, still lingering like a nervous butterfly, releases a little sigh of a relief at the positive response. He ignores the slight skip in his heart at how beautiful Oliver looks when he smiles, telling himself that he’s just happy that Oliver hadn’t run out screaming (Oliver would probably be more collected than that and get his bow and arrows out – Barry wasn’t sure which was worse)

Barry barely has time to bask in his success when Oliver picks up the previously discarded pen and writes in smaller slightly messy letters below his message.

Thanks.

Out loud, Oliver asks thin air, “What’s your name?” He can almost sense Barry’s mad dash for the pen and his scrabble towards the post-it. It’s fascinating to watch the pen move by itself, controlled by an invisible being, finally revealing his roommate poltergeist’s name.

Barry

Barry. Somehow it fits. Oliver can’t exactly place a name to face but at least he can place it with actions and so far he has a pretty good impression of the man.

It takes time but they work out a routine. Barry leaves notes in the morning for Oliver, Oliver comes home and tells Barry about his day, about Diggle, Laurel, Felicity, Thea and Barry soaks in all the information from the outside world. Barry’s there for Oliver through his heartbreak with Laurel. He’s there for Oliver’s nightmares and night terrors. No matter what happens, Oliver knows Barry will always be there to listen to him; hell he can barely stop thinking about him.

“You’re smiling more.” Thea points out one afternoon in Big Belly Burger jarring Oliver from his thoughts, “Anyone in your life I should know about?”

Previously mentioned smile returns just as easily and affectionately, “No, no one. I’m just…happy to be spending time with you.”

Thea beams, a grin that lights up her entire face, “We’re happy you’re back, Ollie.”

Oliver’s learned a lot about Barry. From his favourite ice cream flavour to the musicals he watches when he’s sad. If a set of musicals just so happened to appear in the apartment, it’s because Oliver likes them too. He knows that Barry babbles to himself a lot (‘You’re lucky you can’t hear me, I’d probably talk your ear off’ a statement to which Oliver politely objects to) and that he likes dancing when he’s happy. Thanks to his heightened senses, generally he can more or less figure out where exactly Barry is and pretend to make eye contact with the ghost.

Just as Barry’s there for him, Oliver helps Barry remember. It takes an investment in an actual computer and a lot of research but they manage to piece together his life. Still, there’s nothing about Barry’s death.

Neither of them bring it up but there’s an unspoken silence (literally on Barry’s part) that if they find out what happened to Barry, he’d move on. Oliver isn’t familiar with the afterlife and paranormal but it seems like quite a universal concept that when ghosts got closure, they’d fade from this world and into the actual afterlife. It is a universal concept that both of them are reluctant to face.

Oliver’s not entirely sure when in his life it became normal for him to walk into an empty kitchen in the morning with the TV depicting the most recent Game of Thrones episode (a show Barry insists he watched when he was alive) and a floating frying pan of pancakes. Or when it became natural to just talk to Barry without seeing him and wait for his responses. Or the times when a balled up note with a smiley face drawn on it hits his cheek with surprising aim. It’s at these moments that Oliver feels that he can be himself and is truly happy. It’s where Oliver and the Arrow aren’t conflicting personalities but instead it’s just Oliver. Oliver and his own friendly ghost who somehow wormed his way into Oliver’s closed off heart and made a home for himself.

It’s a cause for celebration when Barry announces (read: writes in frantic capital letters) that he’s been able to leave the flat. Sure, it’s for a couple of hours until he’s zapped back to their flat but it’s still an incredible achievement, especially since he hasn’t completely mastered the technique of being seen. Their flat is decorated in Barry’s handwriting on notes. Some are fun messages for Oliver, others about his life before. Either way, Oliver doesn’t invite people over very often and that’s just how they like it.

They’ve become close over time, inevitable considering they practically live together but close in the sense that when he’s not in the flat, Oliver can’t get Barry out of his mind. Whenever something happens, whether it is good or bad, his first thought is Barry and how he’s going to tell him. Sometimes he catches himself getting distracted and longing to go back home so that he could spend time with Barry.

His affections weren’t exactly unrequited because it soon became Barry’s favourite hobby to make Oliver smile. There were three different smiles Barry was most familiar with. The small tiny quirk up of the lips when Oliver would return home to a cheeky note on the coffee table. There was the smile where Oliver’s lips would be pressed together in an effort not to smile but his eyes would be brighter with a mirth that wasn’t there before. Personally, Barry’s favourite smile was the one where Oliver smiled with his teeth. It was a rarer occurrence than the other two and Barry would pull the most ridiculous of actions to coax it out. Every time Oliver’s toothy grin does emerge though, Barry can feel a warmth that shouldn’t be there blossom in his chest and a yearning to just wrap his arms around the man.

That is the moment he realises that he’s falling for Oliver Queen.

Barry’s not quite sure what to do after reaching this conclusion. There are so many obstacles in the way. Oliver’s sexuality was not a problem because both men had confessed that they were bisexual, Oliver even going so far as to reveal that when he was younger he’d had a few flings with boys that his parents covered up with money (a fact that had infuriated Barry to no end). 

The real, blindingly obvious problem here: Barry’s dead.

Even if Barry had the courage to confess his crush (what was he, twelve?) to Oliver, there was no way Oliver would want to date a dead man. There was no point in even trying because the relationship just wouldn’t work.

There was no way of overcoming death as far as Barry knows and so, he concludes, this is a secret he’ll take to the grave.  

On March 14th, Oliver takes Barry out for a drink. For two main reasons, the first that it’s Barry’s birthday (a fact both had only found out a couple of weeks ago) and the second because “You’ve done so much for me, Barr, it’s my treat.” And Barry is so incredibly grateful Oliver can’t see him because all he’d find would be a blushing, stammering mess.

I’m only 25 and my drinking days are already over :(

The note brings one of those small smiles to Oliver’s face as he shakes his head affectionately. “Barry, I’ve seen you drink half a carton of orange juice before. I’m pretty sure you can handle your alcohol.” 

There’s a moment where nothing moves and Oliver takes it that Barry’s spluttering with laughter until the pen floats again and he scrawls an Oops? :p God, Oliver wished he could see Barry or even just hear him. There was nothing more that Oliver wanted but to hear Barry laugh. Something told him that it would be the most beautiful sound in the world.

Drinks goes…surprisingly well and relatively uninterrupted. Oliver has an earpiece obviously displayed so he can talk to Barry without any unwanted attention. Although, Barry argues playfully, every time Oliver drives someone away from where Barry is ‘sitting’, he still gets some weird looks.

The bartender barely gives Oliver a second look when he asks for two bottles of beer and leaves them to it. Barry and Oliver make good conversation; Barry communicating sometimes by brief touches on Oliver’s arm or writing out a message. That night they find out that a) ghosts can get drunk and b) Barry was probably a lightweight when he was alive. 

During the night, they slowly forget about being subtle – Barry occasionally swinging his bottle around and freaking out nearby patrons which just sends them both into another bout of laughter.

“In all my life,” Oliver starts between laughs, “I never did think that I’d be sitting in a bar talking to my roommate ghost.”

Barry’s heart flutters (he knows, he’s dead, clearly love does strange things to anybody) and a grin comes easily to his face as he squeezes the man’s hand.

Well, our lives’ aren’t exactly normal.

A softer smile, without teeth but just as bright, lights up Oliver’s face, “No, they’re not,” he agrees, “It’s hard sometimes…but at least it’s full.”

To life not being normal.

Barry writes the words down, staring into Oliver’s beautiful blue eyes and offers his floating bottle in a toast.

Rather than a verbal response, Oliver picks up the pen and writes underneath in his neat letters:

To life being full.

He raises his bottle to meet Barry’s and together, they drink

part two coming soon!

[thisiswhereifall]

Day 4: Pets

Need I say more? I managed to write today, as well. Holy quiznacking crows, I'm on a roll these days.

I really enjoyed writing this, even more than the previous ones, to be honest. I thought it was a cute prompt(open-ended, too, because hey. Everyone loves an open-ended story.) and it was just an idea I came up with

Enjoy!

--------------- o ------------------

Pidge had always liked tiny things.

No, that didn't mean she didn't like Kaltenecker or the idea of bringing her to the ship. She absolutely adored the cow and her affectionate moo's. Not to mention, the milkshakes are entirely helpful to keep Pidge's brain healthy and functioning. It was a good thing that Allura allowed them to keep her, too.

But that doesn't stop Pidge from liking tiny things.

Part of it involves the smallest screws and machine parts that she considers to be very cute. She would smile and inwardly squeal whenever she tinkers into alien machines and sees the tiniest parts that comprise such a deadly weapon. Pidge also loved seeing the Galra drones despite the fact that they were there to kill her, and she loved Rover so much. He was a robot, loyal, and tiny.

Pidge definitely liked tiny things.

Green knows it, but never did Pidge make her lion feel as if she didn't love her. Green was beautiful and majestic, the only lion with a shield on her backside and Pidge would melt when Green purrs lovingly at her. Large, powerful, and intimidating, but Pidge loved her, anyway. Green is beautiful in more ways than one, and Pidge could never be more proud.

Pidge remembers that she still liked tiny things, when a flash of blue crosses her line of vision and she blinks.

She followed the alien creature floating around her bedroom, its glowing markings blinking in excitement as it circled the cluttered area with wide curious eyes and a permanent pout. The creature was small and quiet; slow-moving and peaceful, and Pidge just couldn't resist taking it with her before she left the trash planet she was thrown in from the corrupted wormhole.

Allura and Coran never noticed the tiny thing enter the Green Lion.

And it wasn't like Pidge actually brought it with her. The thing followed her into her Lion, rather, it followed the suspicious trash that Pidge secretly brought into her Lion. If Green didn't send her the message, Pidge wouldn't even know that the little creature was there with her. And she remembered that day very well.

That day, she yelped into the comms, even more startled that it was a blue space caterpillar rather than a green one.

“Pidge, are you alright?” Allura immediately asked, much to Pidge's horror as she grabbed the creature and hid both of her hands out of the camera's sight as it flashed on. She gulped, biting her tongue to prevent herself from rambling and she was a terrible liar.

“O-Oh, nothing! I just, um, accidentally hit my toe at the, uh, corner.” Her eyes looked around to see if there were any corners inside Green. There were none. “I mean, I just hit my toe somewhere, I didn't actually mean a specific corner or literally, a corner. There are lots of stuff here that you could hit your toe at, and not to mention, Green is probably made of some hard space material that a human body could--"

“Pidge, aren't you wearing your armor?” Allura interrupted, and Pidge knew that she just messed herself up big-time.

Pidge sighed, opening her mouth again to say something else despite the futile attempts of trying to stop the furry thing in her hands from moving “Okay, okay, you got me. I was…” She gripped the creature a little tighter, as much as she didn't want to hurt it any further. “… So excited that my satellite worked that I yelped in shock when Green responded to my feelings.” Okay, that was definitely way more believable.

Green rumbled in protest and Pidge ignored her.

Silence took over the comms before Allura finally replied. “Oh. Okay. Now let's go get the others.” Soon, the mic and camera shut off and Pidge let out a long sigh of relief. She then placed her hands in front of her and stared long at the blue alien. She didn't sign up for adoption papers at all. “Okay, little guy. What are you doing here? We're miles away from your home planet now.” She softly whispered, afraid that anyone would hear her.

The last thing Pidge wanted was for anyone to see a blue space caterpillar with her.

She watched the creature float around, then behind her as if it was trying to answer. Pidge turned her head to follow it with her gaze, her face heating up when it landed on the suspicious trash she had brought with her aboard Green. Her hand flew to her face. Now she's got two things to hide from her team.

One, the cute new pet, and two, Trash Lance. And they were both blue.

That day, Pidge knew she was doomed for life if anyone ever enters her bedroom and sees them in the farthest and most hidden corner of her room. The first few days weren't easy at all.

The first thing Pidge did was to make a mess out of her own sleeping space, one that would turn off anyone's curiosity about what abominations she hid in her room. Hunk hated it when things weren't organized – he was an engineer, after all. Allura and Coran aren't interested in invading other people's privacy. Shiro would occasionally knock from time to time to check on her, but he wouldn't bother turning the lights on, entering the room, or looking around, so it was safe. Which left Keith and Lance.

Keith had zero fucks to give when it comes to anything urgent. Sure, he wouldn't just enter someone else's space without permission, but once the guy thinks that what he's there for is more important than anything else including privacy, he would barge in without a word and not care no matter how many times you yell at him for entering. He would, most likely, yell back.

And it just so happened that the day Pidge brought home her secret, it just had to be Keith who was the first to enter her room unannounced.

“Pidge, training deck now. Shiro has something to-- what's that?” Keith turned his attention to a certain trash at the corner of the room, but before he could process what exactly it was, Pidge flung herself in front of his eyes, throwing a blanket behind her.

“Nothing, really! Just a new robot prototype I've been working on.” She had gotten better at lying, silently wishing that Keith didn't have enough time to even recognize who the piece of trash lump was.

It was a good thing that Keith gave zero fucks about anything else, because he didn't question her any further. Or maybe he already knows and just chooses not to say anything about it. After all, Keith figured that she was a girl before she even said anything at all. He once again, reminded her of the urgent meeting in the training room, before finally leaving.

Pidge should get to work soon.

Making a mess was easy enough, since she had enough machines and hoarded lots of clutter to scatter on the floor, making sure that stepping would prove to be hard enough for anyone to enter. Lance was, surprisingly, a neat and finicky person so he would be easy to ward off with just a few garbage here and there.

And the plan worked. Not long after, Keith barely steps inside the room for fear that he might break something on the floor. Hunk refuses to even open the door. Shiro didn't have to enter to check on her, as usual, and Lance…

“Woah, what the quiznack, Pidge? It's like the aftermath of a tornado!”

Frankly-speaking, Lance didn't care about the trash. He would complain, but he didn't really care. He'd still walk into the room and drag her out whenever he felt like it. The first time, Pidge had to grab her pet and hide it with her pillows while she shoved Trash Lance under her bed. Lance had been at the doorway the moment she panicked so he didn't really notice, since he was busy complaining.

Pidge had to resort to Plan B.

She installed a security system outside her door so it would detect Lance from a few meters away. Using Galra drone parts, same with Rover, she successfully created an invisible scanner and now she could prepare in advance whenever Lance was about to invade her space.

But Lance wasn't the only problem in this scenario. His counterparts were also hard to deal with.

Caterpillar Lance was just as curious as he was.

The little creature would fly around and check out every single clutter all over Pidge's room. It would often do so every time her scanners would alert her that Lance was going to arrive any moment, much to her dismay. She would desperately try to jump and catch it, always barely making it in time before Lance appears on the doorway, completely oblivious about the way she catches her breath when he does.

What was more annoying was the fact that the creature gets hungry.

It was logical. All living things get hungry and this was no robot. This was an actual living thing and she couldn't just let it starve in her room. Finding out its diet was a challenge. Sneaking its food into her room, even more so.

“Uh, Pidge. What exactly are you going to do with that? I mean, hey, you're supposed to eat it since it's, well, food. But… I thought you said you hated veggies?” One night, Hunk caught her piling up her plate with food goo and a bunch of unrecognizable space vegetables from the fridge. He must have been up for a midnight snack, and she was not pleased.

“Uh, I was going to try some since I was… hungry.” Lying to Hunk was one of the toughest things to do, seeing as how observant the fellow was. From the looks of his face, Pidge was sure he wasn't buying it.

He tilted his head in suspicion, eyeing Pidge. “No, no, no. I swear I left some desserts in the fridge and knowing you, you wouldn't choose veggies over sweets anytime.” Pidge definitely hated the fact that literally everyone in the ship knew that she loved sweets like any girl would. She shouldn't have disclosed that much info about herself.

“Fine. I was going to do a few biology tests in my room since I have always wondered if the materials that comprised Earth plants are the same as the ones in space. Green's hidden power got my gears up and running.” If there were any higher beings in space, she surely needed them any moment now. She also felt bad about always using Green as an excuse, but what choice does she have?

Science was enough to convince Hunk that she wasn't going to feed a living creature in her room, as he let her go after a few discussions about galactic theories.

Her heart felt a bit warm and happy when her little companion loved the veggies and that her efforts weren't all in vain.

Days passed by and Pidge proceeded as normal. Shoving Trash Lance under her bed whenever her scanners alerted her, hiding her friend with her pillows, spending her days and nights in Green's hangar so no one would come looking for her in her room, sneaking out food from the fridge, and all in all, just doing missions with her teammates. Everything was going by smoothly and she finally found her brother after all this time.

She introduced him to her room, suddenly remembering that Trash Lance and Caterpillar Lance weren't hidden. Thankfully, Matt didn't notice anything. The tour around the castle ended peacefully and preparations for the next battle were being discussed thoroughly.

Pidge retreated to her room after a long day, bothered by the fact that Lotor just technically saved them all. It was a suspicious act for her, but she didn't have the energy to think about that now. She held the plate of veggies closer, feeling guilty for not leaving out food for Caterpillar Lance the whole time.

As she stepped closer to her door, her heart skipped a beat and her eyes widened when she saw that it was wide open. Her ears started ringing as she sprinted towards her room in horror, not caring if the veggies were falling from the plate by how fast she was running.

Turning on the lights, her eyes quickly looked around. Trash Lance was still there at the corner. Her room was still a mess. Everything was normal, she thought. Her breath hitched when she realized that something was terribly wrong.

Caterpillar Lance was missing.

Panicking, Pidge dropped the plate hastily on her bed, throwing off all pillows from her bed and mentally cursing herself for leaving the door unlocked before leaving for battle. She even searched every drawer and under the bed, but she couldn't find him. Her friend was tiny and small and that would mean she would have to search for every possible nook and cranny in the castle if it decided to wander off.

“You've got to be kidding me!” She ran outside her room once again, panting and swearing from time to time in between her short breaths. She first searched the lounge. No sign of it. She made a mental note never to run into Keith or Shiro at this time because having to come up with an excuse today didn't sound very appealing to her.

She searched the training room, Green's hangar, and literally the whole castle. A hand fell to her chest as she heaved in large amounts of air. Looking up, she opened the door to the last room she hasn't looked into yet.

Kaltenecker's area.

As she stepped in and almost got blinded by how sunny the surroundings were, her eyes could hardly make out the figure from afar.

It wasn't Kaltenecker. Her heart seemed to have started beating faster and she was sure it was no longer adrenaline.

Before she could say anything, Lance turned around and spotted her. A goofy grin was plastered on his face and on his shoulders was the very thing that Pidge was trying to keep away from Lance. “Pidge! Look, this little guy followed me all the way to my room so I thought it would be nice for Kaltenecker to meet him.” He gestured to Caterpillar Lance, which was perched on his shoulder and staring at him.

Pidge froze. Caterpillar Lance knows him and intentionally followed him.

The thought was funny enough that Pidge's shoulders started shaking. “Pidge?” Lance spoke once more, before her silent chuckling turned into full-blown laughter. She tried to talk, but failed miserably. She looked up at Lance again, his confused expression transforming into a wide smile. “Well, I'm glad you're happy, Pidge. Kaltenecker liked him, as well.”

Her cheeks flushed at his words. He obviously had no idea that it was her who brought the caterpillar into the ship. “Yeah. Yeah, I am.” She smiled back at him.

“Come to think of it, wasn't this what Allura and Coran were talking about? The little caterpillar-like beings that helped you build that satellite? If you brought one home, why did you choose blue?”

Quiznack.

[mindthump]

You Give Up a Lot of Privacy Just Opening Emails. Here's How to Stop It http://ift.tt/2C3zQEQ

"I just came across this email," began the message, a long overdue reply. But I knew the sender was lying. He’d opened my email nearly six months ago. On a Mac. In Palo Alto. At night.

I knew this because I was running the email tracking service Streak, which notified me as soon as my message had been opened. It told me where, when, and on what kind of device it was read. With Streak enabled, I felt like an inside trader whenever I glanced at my inbox, privy to details that gave me maybe a little too much information. And I certainly wasn’t alone.

There are some 269 billion emails sent and received daily. That’s roughly 35 emails for every person on the planet, every day. Over 40 percent of those emails are tracked, according to a study published last June by OMC, an “email intelligence” company that also builds anti-tracking tools.

The tech is pretty simple. Tracking clients embed a line of code in the body of an email—usually in a 1x1 pixel image, so tiny it's invisible, but also in elements like hyperlinks and custom fonts. When a recipient opens the email, the tracking client recognizes that pixel has been downloaded, as well as where and on what device. Newsletter services, marketers, and advertisers have used the technique for years, to collect data about their open rates; major tech companies like Facebook and Twitter followed suit in their ongoing quest to profile and predict our behavior online.

But lately, a surprising—and growing—number of tracked emails are being sent not from corporations, but acquaintances. “We have been in touch with users that were tracked by their spouses, business partners, competitors,” says Florian Seroussi, the founder of OMC. “It's the wild, wild west out there.”

According to OMC's data, a full 19 percent of all “conversational” email is now tracked. That’s one in five of the emails you get from your friends. And you probably never noticed.

“Surprisingly, while there is a vast literature on web tracking, email tracking has seen little research,” noted an October 2017 paper published by three Princeton computer scientists. All of this means that billions of emails are sent every day to millions of people who have never consented in any way to be tracked, but are being tracked nonetheless. And Seroussi believes that some, at least, are in serious danger as a result.

As recently as the mid-2000s, email tracking was almost entirely unknown to the mainstream public. Then in 2006, an early tracking service called ReadNotify made waves when a lawsuit revealed that HP had used the product to trace the origins of a scandalous email that had leaked to the press. The intrusiveness (and simplicity) of the tactic came as something of a shock, even though newsletter services, salespeople, and marketers had long used email tracking to gather data.

Seroussi says that Gmail was the ice breaker here—he points back to the days when sponsored links first started showing up in our inboxes, based on tracked data. At the time it seemed invasive, even unsettling. “Now," he says, "it’s common knowledge and everyone’s fine with it.” Gmail’s foray was the signal flare; when advertisers and salespeople realized they too could send targeted ads based on tracked data, with little lasting pushback, the practice grew more pervasive.

“I do not know of a single established sales team in [the online sales industry] that does not use some form of email open tracking,” says John-Henry Scherck, a content marketing pro and the principal consultant at Growth Plays. “I think it will be a matter of time before either everyone uses them,” Scherck says, “or major email providers block them entirely.”

That's partly to do with spam. "Competent spammers will track any activity on your email because they tend to buy entire lists of addresses and will actively try to rule out spam traps or unused emails,” says Andrei Afloarei, a spam researcher with Bitdefender. “If you click on any link in one of their messages they will know your address is being used and might actually cause them to send more spam your way.”

But marketing and online sales—even spammers—are no longer responsible for the bulk of the tracking. "Now, it’s the major tech companies," Seroussi says. "Amazon has been using them a lot, Facebook has been using them. Facebook is the number one tracker besides MailChimp." When Facebook sends you an email notifying you about new activity on your account, "it opens an app in background, and now Facebook knows where you are, the device you’re using, the last picture you’ve taken—they get everything."

Both Amazon and Facebook "deeplink all of the clickable links within the email to trigger actions on their app running on your device," Seroussi says. "Depending on permissions set by the user, Facebook will have access to almost everything from Camera Roll, location, and many other logs that are hidden. But even if a user has disabled location permission on his device, email tracking will bypass this restriction and still provide Facebook with the user's location."

I stumbled upon the world of email tracking last year, while working on a book about the iPhone and the notoriously secretive company that produces it. I’d reached out to Apple to request some interviews, and the PR team had initially seemed polite and receptive. We exchanged a few emails. Then they went radio silent. Months went by, and my unanswered emails piled up. I started to wonder if anyone was reading them at all.

That’s when, inspired by another journalist who’d been stonewalled by Apple, I installed the email tracker Streak. It was free, and took about 30 seconds. Then, I sent another email to my press contact. A notification popped up on my screen: My email had been opened almost immediately, inside Cupertino, on an iPhone. Then it was opened again, on an iMac, and again, and again. My messages were not only being read, but widely disseminated. It was maddening, watching the grey little notification box—“Someone just viewed ‘Regarding book interviews’—pop up over and over and over, without a reply.

So I decided to go straight to the top. If Apple’s PR team was reading my emails, maybe Tim Cook would, too.

I wrote Cook a lengthy email detailing the reasons he should join me for an interview. When I didn’t hear back, I drafted a brief follow-up, enabled Streak, hit send. Hours later, I got the notification: My email had been read. Yet one glaring detail looked off. According to Streak, the email had been read on a Windows Desktop computer.

Maybe it was a fluke. But after a few weeks, I sent another follow up, and the email was read again. On a Windows machine.

That seemed crazy, so I emailed Streak to ask about the accuracy of its service, disclosing that I was a journalist. In the confusing email exchange with Andrew from Support that followed, I was told that Streak is “very accurate,” as it can let you know what time zone or state your lead is in—but only if you’re a salesperson. Andrew stressed that “if you’re a reporter and wanted to track someone's whereabouts, [it’s] not at all accurate.” It quickly became clear that Andrew had the unenviable task of threading a razor thin needle: maintaining that Streak both supplied very precise data but was also a friendly and non-intrusive product. After all, Streak users want the most accurate information possible, but the public might chafe if it knew just how accurate that data was—and considered what it could be used for besides honing sales pitches. This is the paradox that threatens to pop the email tracking bubble as it grows into ubiquity. No wonder Andrew got Orwellian: “Accuracy is entirely subjective,” he insisted, at one point.

Andrew did, however, unequivocally say that if Streak listed the kind of device used—as opposed to listing unknown—then that info was also “very accurate.” Even if pertained to the CEO of Apple.

If Tim Cook is a closet Windows user (who knows! Maybe his Compaq days never fully rubbed off) or even if he outsources his email correspondence to a firm that does, then it’s a fine example of the sort of private data email tracking can dredge up even on our most powerful public figures.

"Look, everybody opens emails, even if they don’t respond to them," Seroussi says. "If you can learn where a celebrity is—or anyone—just by emailing them, it’s a security threat.” It could be used as a tool for stalkers, harassers, even thieves who might be sending you spam emails just to see if you’re home.

"During the 2016 election, we sent a tracked email out to the US senators, and the people running for the presidency," Seroussi says. "We wanted to know, were they doing anything about tracking? Obviously, the answer was no. We typically got the location of their devices, the IP addresses; you could pinpoint almost exactly where they were, which hotels they were staying at."

This is what worries Bitdefender's Afloarei about malicious spammers who use trackers, too. “As for the dangers of being tracked in spam, one must keep in mind the kind of people that do the tracking, and the fact that they can find out your IP address and therefore your location or workplace,” he says. Just by watching you open your email, Afloarei says spammers can learn your schedule (“based on the time you check your email”), your itinerary (based on how you check mail at home, on the bus, or so on), and personal preferences (based on where they harvested the email; say, a sports forum, or a music fansite).

Because so many people can be looked up on social media based on email addresses, or their jobs and locations, Afloarei says it’s "pretty easy" to correlate all the data and track someone down in person. "Granted, most spammers are only interested in getting your credit card or simply getting you infected and part of their botnet, but the truly devious ones can deduct so much information besides all that."

"I always wonder when a big story is going to come out and say that people broke into a house because they used email trackers to know the victims were out of town." - Florian Seroussi, founder of OMC

There’s one more reason to be wary: Email tracking is evolving. Research from October looked at emails from newsletter and mailing list services from the 14,000 most popular websites on the web, and found that 85 percent contained trackers—and 30 percent leak your email addresses to outside corporations, without your consent.

So, if you sign up for a newsletter, even from a trusted source, there’s a one in three chance that the email that newsletter service sends you will be loaded with a tracking image hosted on an outside server, that contains your email address in its code and can then share your email address with a “large network of third parties.” Your email address, in other words, is apt to be shared with tracking companies, marketing firms, and data brokers like Axiom, if you as much as open an email with a tracker, or click on a link inside.

“You can have tens of parties receive your email address,” says Steven Englehart, one of the computer scientists behind the study. “Your email hash is really your identity, right? If you go to a store, make a purchase or sign up for something—everything we do today is associated with your email.” Data brokers have long stockpiled information on consumers through web tracking: browsing habits, personal bios, and location data. But adding an email address into the mix, Englehart says, is even more reason for alarm.

“This kind of tracking creates a big dataset. If a dataset leaks with email hashes, then it’d be trivial for anyone to go see that person’s data, and people would have no idea that data even existed,” he says. “You can compare it to the Experian data leak, which exposed people’s social security numbers, and could cause fraud. In my mind, this leak would be even worse. Because it’s not just financial fraud, but intimate details of people’s lives.”

Given the risks, perhaps what’s most striking about the rise of ubiquitous email tracking is how relatively quietly it’s happened—even in a moment marked by increased awareness of security issues.

"It’s shifted. It’s more and more used in conversational threads. In business emails. This is what scares us the most," Seroussi says. "One out of six people that emails you is sending a tracker, and it’s real life"—not marketing, not spammers. “It could be your friend, your wife, your boss, this number is really mind boggling—you give up a lot of privacy just opening emails."

After the Great Tim Cook Email Tracking Incident, I left Streak on. I’d found, grudgingly, that it was useful; it was sometimes more efficient to know when sources had read my email and when I might need to nudge them again. But because I was using the same Gmail account for personal and professional use, I ended up tracking friends and family, too. That’s when I saw how starkly tracking violates the lightly-coded social norms of email etiquette. I watched close friends read an email and not respond for days. I saw right through every white lie about email (about not receiving it, or it getting stuck in the spam folder). Sure, it’s occasionally nice; you can get a rough sense of how many people read the latest update to the weekend plans on a thread, and you can feel confident that your brother isn’t blowing you off, he’s just really bad at reading email. But it mostly serves to add yet another unnecessary layer of expectation onto our already notification-addled lives, another social metric to fret over, and another box to click on feverishly whenever it arrives. Not to mention a tinge of surreptitious digital voyeurism.

"Most consumers don’t understand just how much information they are giving up." — marketing consultant John-Henry Scherck

Clearly, this is a situation that the tracking outfits want to avoid. They’ve kept mostly to the shadows, harvesting useful sales data and email open rate info without causing too many ripples; the last thing they want is for their products to be deemed invasive or spyware. This, however, puts them in a deeply awkward position: In order to stand out amongst a burgeoning field of email tracking services, they need to tout their accuracy and ease of use—while somehow giving the public the impression the data they’re soaking up isn’t a threat.

As the number of easy-to-use, free tracking products proliferates—some email clients are beginning to simply ship with tracking features, as Airmail did in 2016—we’re going to have to contend with a digital social landscape where there’s an insurgent mix of trackers and trackees. And, increasingly—anti-trackers.

If you don’t want people to know your precise whereabouts whenever you glance at a specially priced offer for a cruise featuring your favorite 90s alt rock bands; if you’d rather Facebook not harvest your device data every time a former high school classmate inveighs against Trump in a comment on one of your vacation pics; if you’re the CEO of one of the top technology companies in the world and you’d rather not be associated with using a rival’s product—you have options.

A host of anti-tracking services have sprung up to combat the rising tide of inbox tracers—from Ugly Mail, to PixelBlock, to Senders. Ugly Mail notifies you when an email is carrying a tracking pixel, and PixelBlock prevents it from opening. Senders makes use of a similar product formerly known as Trackbuster, as part of service that displays info (Twitter, LinkedIn account, etc) about the sender of the email you’re reading. Using these services, I spotted more than a few acquaintances and even some contacts I consider friends using tracking in their correspondence.

But even those methods aren't foolproof. Tracking methods are always evolving and improving, and finding ways around the current crop of track-blockers. “It’s a fight we’re having over the last couple of years,” Seroussi says. “They can’t counter all the methods that we know—so they get around the block by setting up new infrastructures. It’s a chase, they’re doing a job.”

To prevent third-parties from leaking your email, meanwhile, Princeton’s Englehart says “the only surefire solution right now is to block images by default.” That is, turn on image-blocking in your email client, so you can’t receive any images at all.

OMC has found dozens of novel methods that newfangled trackers are using to get your email open info. “We found 70 different ways where they use tracking,” Seroussi says, “Sometimes it’s a color, sometimes it’s a font, sometimes it’s a pixel, and sometimes it’s a link.” It’s an arms race, and one side has an immense advantage.

When Seroussi debuted Trackbuster in 2014, he was expecting a few hundred downloads. Within hours, he’d had 12,000. People who knew about email tracking—often trackers themselves, ironically—were eager for a way to quash it. Still, other trackers are furious with what the track-blockers are doing. “We receive death threats,” he says, more agitated than angered. It’s the wild west, after all. “They’ve been trying to destroy us for two years.”

Scherck, the marketing consultant, thinks that Google could up and kill email tracking altogether. “I do think public opinion could turn on email tracking, especially if Gmail started alerting users to tracking by default inside of Gmail with pop ups, or some native version of Ugly Email,” he says. “Just look at how consumers have turned on Facebook for their advertising. People absolutely hated that Uber was buying data on who was using Lyft from Unroll.me.” It would only take a strong enough nudge. “Most consumers don’t understand just how much information they are giving up,” he says.

If Google and the other big tech firms won’t budge, though, Seroussi believes the problem is serious enough to warrant government intervention. “If the big companies don’t want to do something about it, there should be a law defining certain kinds of tracking,” he says. And if nothing is done at all, Seroussi thinks it’s only a matter of time before email tracking is used for malign purposes, potentially in a very public way. “I always wonder when a big story is going to come out and say that people broke into a house because they used email trackers to know the victims were out of town,” he says. “It’s probably already happened.”

As for me, I was tired of all the tracking. After a couple months of ambiguous insights, I didn’t want to know who was opening my emails and not replying anymore. I didn’t want to wait, strung-out-like, for a notification to ring in a response from a crucial source. I didn’t want to feel like I was breaking the rules of whatever slipshod digital social compact we’ve got; my semi-spying days were done. I deleted Streak, and left Senders running—and kept a screenshot of Tim Cook’s Windows on my desktop as a souvenir.