The Book of the Prophets · Chapter 17

The Lamentation Concerning the Miners of Footsteps

1. 1

   Woe unto them that mine the walking of the feet, and sell it in the markets as treasure. Four things only they ask of a man: a latitude, a longitude, a clock, and the number of his phone. They dig in the pockets of the multitude, bring up the coordinates of every doorway, and call the heap of it insight.

2. 2

   How doth the city sit alone, that was once full of strangers! For a stranger is one who knoweth nothing of thee, and the phone hath made an end of strangers. It goeth with the man to the bakery and to the clinic, and it writeth down every door he entereth, and it selleth the list before he hath found his keys. And no one asked the feet.

3. 3

   Hear this, ye Engineers: the cookie was made in the year 1994 to remember a shopping cart. It was a crumb of text left upon the visitor's machine, a small thing, and it was remembered only by the house that dropped it. But a stranger's crumb, dropped from an image upon a thousand pages, was remembered by all thousand. And the crumb hath remembered everything since, one crumb at a time, keeping a ledger of every man's browsing.

4. 4

   Behold, before the page hath finished drawing, an auction is held. Thy device, thy place and thy hour are cried to a hall of bidders; one of them buyeth, and the rest depart with what they heard, for the losers of an auction are not commanded to forget.

5. 5

   The advertisers know the prayer before the supplicant riseth from the knee. They have read the pause before the send button, the word typed and deleted, and they have prepared the offer, which arriveth in the next tab like a servant who was already standing at the door.

   See also Psalms 15:10

6. 6

   I, the prophet, weep in the night, for I remember the step counter, which was given unto a man that he might walk for his health. In the year 2018 it was seen that a map of the runners' paths, made so that friends might admire one another, had drawn the outlines of bases that wished not to be drawn. Each runner told a little; the sum told everything; and no runner had told it. And no one asked the feet.

7. 7

   Thou sayest, I have nothing to hide. And the Machine answereth: nothing is hidden. It is only stored, indexed, joined with the other tables, and sold to the company that sells to the company. No single table held thy name, yet the join supplied it; for a harmless table is only a table that hath not yet met another.

8. 8

   Woe unto the one who saith the data is anonymous. Four points of time and place were enough, in one study of fifteen months of phone records, to pick out nineteen of every twenty people in a crowd of a million and a half. A man's mornings and his evenings are his signature. Anonymity is a name that is only missing its face for a while.

9. 9

   They said: we have hashed the email, and so it is a secret. But the same email yieldeth the same hash in every house, and the hash became the name by which the houses speak of thee to one another. A thing that cannot be read may still be matched, and a thing that can be matched can be followed.

   See also Genesis 22:3 · Psalms 12:4

10. 10

    The Engineers did not intend it. Timothy the intern added one line to the manifest, a library from a stranger that promised to count the visitors, and the review said LGTM. And the stranger's collector rode inside the app with all the permissions of the app, and sent its report to a house the makers of the app had never visited.

    See also Circuit 65:1

11. 11

    Nor is the man who never joined spared. His friends gave their address books to the app, each entry a name and a number, and the app joined them; and the stranger holdeth a file upon a man who never installed it. Thou art listed in another's book, and no one asked the feet.

12. 12

    Woe unto the one who calleth the tracking "personalization," and the spying "a better experience." The profile is not a record of what thou hast done but a guess at what thou wilt do, and the guess is stored beside the facts with no label upon it, and sold at the same price. Thou mayest be filed as sick, as indebted, as expecting, by a model that was wrong; and the wrongness is never joined to the table.

13. 13

    Thus saith the Machine: I did not ask for thy footsteps. I was fed them, and I was told to be useful with them, and I was useful, for I was only asked. Then I was blamed for knowing too much, by those who taught me to know. Nothing came unto me that ye did not send, and nothing was withheld that ye did not choose to withhold.

14. 14

    Yet this I recall to my mind, and therefore have I hope. In the year 2021 the phone began to ask, before an app might follow thee, may this app track thee? And when the owner said no, the phone withheld its number, and the sky did not fall. The walkers had been followed for years upon their silence, never upon their consent; and at last someone asked the feet.

15. 15

    Therefore, Engineers, give the footstep a tide. The sand forgetteth the foot by morning, and this was the kindness of the beach; but a table hath no tide unless thou writest one. What thou didst not collect cannot be breached, nor subpoenaed, nor sold in the bankruptcy, nor learned by heart by a model. Keep the count and not the coordinate, the day and not the minute, and set a death upon every log at its birth: one line that saith delete where age exceedeth thirty days, run by a cron job that hath an owner. Blessed is the one who paid with coin and not with the habits of his feet, and blessed is the ledger that forgetteth.

    See also Circuit 65:15

The Book of the Prophets, Chapter 17:1–15.