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She pressed "Start Video."

She obeyed like a prisoner taking a mugshot. The machine’s eye scanned her pores, the geometry of her cheekbones, the distance between her pupils. Somewhere in a server farm, an algorithm was deciding if she was real. Facebook.com Login Identify

The blue loading bar crawled. One percent. Ten percent. Seventy. She pressed "Start Video

Then:

But something was wrong. A notification banner hung at the top: “Welcome back, Maya. We’ve locked your account due to suspicious activity. Please verify your phone number.” The blue loading bar crawled

Two hours earlier, she’d gotten the email. “Your Facebook account was accessed from a device in Hanoi, Vietnam. If this wasn’t you, secure your account.” Her heart had seized. That old account—the one with baby pictures of her son, the last messages from her late sister, the decade of her life scrapbooked into a digital attic—was under siege.

The page asked for a selfie. Not just any selfie. It asked her to turn her head slowly, to blink, to prove she was flesh and blood and not a bot, not a ghost, not the hacker who’d already changed her password once tonight.