'The Audacity' creator and its star want to remind you online privacy is a myth

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The catalyst for Jonathan Glatzer to create “The Audacity,” AMC’s dark satire of Silicon Valley that takes aim at the desperation that plagues it, began as a father witnessing his teenage son’s relationship with tech.Like many parents raising children in a tech-dominated culture, Glatzer, early on, tried to help his son understand the unseen trail his online activities leave behind with every swipe, tap, post or video viewed — and the digital reputation that can be shaped and set from that.

Glatzer succeeded, almost too well.“I found myself being in one of those equivocating positions of saying, ‘Well, it’s not good and yes, they are watching and creating a data footprint about everything that you do and watch, and your various proclivities and inclinations, but it’s not so bad,’” says Glatzer, whose previous credits incude “Succession” and “Better Call Saul.” “It’s just negotiating the middle ground, negotiating the thing you can live with in a world where it’s really difficult to live without tech.And he didn’t buy it.

I really did see, through his eyes, this dilemma of: How do you live in this world and maintain the growth and evolution of your own voice and be an individual?”Such questions and dilemmas fuel the tension of the series, primarily through Duncan Park (Billy Magnussen), the narcissistic and morally unhinged CEO of a data-mining startup called Hypergnosis who is desperately trying to get his company acquired by the Apple-esque Cupertino, and willing to go to deceitful lengths to do it.He confides those tactics to his therapist, JoAnne Felder (Sarah Goldberg), who has her own scheme going, trading stocks on the information shared by her powerful or connected clientele during sessions.

When Duncan discovers this, he proposes a threat in the form of deal: If she’ll help him, he won’t expose her.Like a pinball hurled into ...