My Darling B got tired of her laptop staring at her while she’s surfing food porn web sites. It’s got a little built-in camera at the top of the flip-up screen that she could use to take photos or record videos of herself if she were so inclined. Since she is most vehemently not, she has used it just once, to record our New Year’s wishes to our adoring crowds last year. So it’s really no more than a novelty item that gets used once in a blue moon, usually when alcohol’s involved. (This appears to be typical for many a video on internet.)

She never thought much about it since then, even when stories surfaced in the news about people using laptop video cameras to watch users in ways that did not not at first seem all that creepy until sitting down in front of a laptop with a camera lens staring at you. A few seconds of that and you’re sure the whole world is watching you.

At first, B tried to use common sense. “It’s got a little red light that comes on,” she reasoned, or whistled in the dark, take your pick. “Nobody would be able to hack into my laptop and turn on my camera to watch me without turning on the little red light.”

“Riiiiight,” I answered her, patting the back of her hand, “that would never happen.”

She stubbornly stuck to her common-sense, rational approach to her video camera until yesterday, when we heard a story on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me about the Kinect, Microsoft’s new game accessory that lets you control your XBox by standing in front of it and gesturing. Not only can it see you and recognize what you’re doing, it could also (according to Microsoft), or absolutely would not under any circumstances (according to, again, Microsoft) be used to send targeted advertisements to your television set.

Coincidentally, after B heard that, she covered her video camera lens with a band-aid. She still maintains she doesn’t think anybody’s watching her, but why take the chance? It’s Pascal’s Wager applied to Big Brother.