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Emma Watson is no stranger to the threat of privacy leaks.

After watching many of her female Hollywood peers have private photoshacked and published online, Watson was the target of a bizarre hoax by a team of scammers that threatened to leak her private information as well.

Even worse than seeing women's privacy violated on social media is reading the accompanying comments that show such a lack of empathy.

— Emma Watson (@EmWatson)

In her next movie role, Watson will address the perils of online privacy head-on, starring in the thriller The Circle alongside Tom Hanks. An adaptation of the Dave Eggars novel of the same name, Watson’s heroine goes to work at a massive tech company, discovering the dark side of a society where our online and offline ones are inextricably linked.

When Mae Holland is hired to work for the Circle, the world’s most powerful internet company, she feels she’s been given the opportunity of a lifetime. The Circle, run out of a sprawling California campus, links users’ personal emails, social media, banking, and purchasing with their universal operating system, resulting in one online identity and a new age of civility and transparency.

Mae can’t believe her luck, her great fortune to work for the most influential company in the world—even as life beyond the campus grows distant, even as a strange encounter with a colleague leaves her shaken, even as her role at the Circle becomes increasingly public. What begins as the captivating story of one woman’s ambition and idealism soon becomes a heart-racing novel of suspense, raising questions about memory, history, privacy, democracy, and the limits of human knowledge.