‘Shared Data,’ a short story from an alternate future(5)

“That’s what I was going to tell you,” Genevieve said, glancing at the timer in the corner of the screen. Their employee handbook said explicitly that five minutes over the ART Act-required minimum every once in a while wasn’t penalized, but everyone suspected the office manager tracked those minutes and that at some point they were going to come back to haunt you. “We set up a data cooperative here last year – no, two years ago. At first it wasn’t much, but once enough people joined and we were able to get some of the companies to contribute the data they’d collected—”