The Blind Spot is about a city where no one has any privacy. Everything they say and do is recorded. But there’s one district in this city, called The Blind Spot, which offers full anonymity and privacy. Everyone even puts on masks when they enter this district. There’s a delicate truce between the residents of the city and The Blind Spot.
The book centers around two main characters, one who lives in The Blind Spot, and one who is a resident of the city. The resident’s storyline is really where data privacy and the anonymity of The Blind Spot are on display. The residents of the city have an app on their phone which notifies them anytime someone (anywhere in the city) says something nice about them. The main character is desperate for approval so he intentionally says lots of nice things about his co-workers out loud as he walks to work just so they’ll be notified that he said something nice. But there’s a rumor that you could jailbreak the app and actually hear everything someone says about you, not just the nice things…
Unfortunately, the other main character, the one who lives in The Blind Spot, has basically every cybernetic enhancement possible. It makes her character boring in my opinion. Her storyline and the conflict she’s trying to resolve is fine, but I think the author made her so overpowered that a lot of the tension goes away.
The novel is full of your standard cyberpunk tropes with low-lifes, crime bosses, hackers, cybernetic enhancements, giant corporations trying to keep the populace subdued, etc. But it’s rare to find a cyberpunk novel that also touches on privacy and anonymity. That’s really where I thought this book stood out. Unfortunately, aside from some fun ideas with the resident’s storyline, the author doesn’t really have anything to say about privacy in general. I read the second book in the series and it’s about Ms. Plot Armor going on an adventure in a different city and data privacy is no longer a theme at all. So yeah, this is a soft recommendation. It’s a fun pulp cyberpunk read but nothing more.
I know if I really wanted data privacy handled in a cyberpunk novel I could read Little Brother, but that isn’t cyberpunk enough for me. It’s a great YA novel but it’s more “near future” than cyberpunk.