Technology

"My friend just sent me this video, told me she’d found me in it,” read the text. “As I was looking for myself, I noticed you’re in it too. I didn’t know I was being filmed, guess you don’t either, just wanted to let you know …”

When Nancy Naylor Hayes received the message in November 2023, she felt a twinge of fear. It was from an acquaintance she hadn’t heard from in years. “I was panicking,” she says. The text pointed her to a Facebook link, which led to a montage of clips of women filmed on the streets of Manchester during nights out.

“You don’t know what you might have been caught doing,” she says. “What if they’ve got a horrible video of me?” She saw herself a few minutes in, with a friend she had been with that night as they visited the city’s bars. Clearly oblivious to the camera filming her, she stands on a pavement outside a doorway on her phone – calling a taxi, she recalls – her hand on the hip of her khaki miniskirt. Then the film-maker zooms in on her face and lingers there before recording her reaching across to wipe something from her friend’s cheek.