Last week I saw a frightening thing.
Last week I saw a tech demo for an open source mapping library. Imagine a dark wireframe map, black and purple and yellow, different shades of gray, the kind of visualization that looks slick like science fiction, even now, in 2026. At the center of the map: a pizza restaurant in a Florida college town. Gray roads spread out from the franchise like a spider’s web, connecting it with the towns and cities of the southeast. Click a button and little 3D boxes appear on the screen, each little polygon representing one of the burger joints, tire repair shops, big box retailers, houses, or apartment buildings surrounding the pizza restaurant. Click another button and outlines appear on the ground—geofences. The one surrounding the pizza franchise glows dark orange. Click the next button and little yellow dots appear on the screen, dozens of dots, all within the dark orange glow of the boundary surrounding the pizza restaurant. Each one of these dots is a cell phone that pinged a tower from inside the geofence. Each one of these dots is a person.
Click another button and purple dots appear on the screen. Some of them are close to the pizza restaurant. Some of them are far away.Each one of these dots is where the phone represented by one of the yellow dots “spends the night.” Each one of these dots is a person’s home.
Click another button and the number of yellow dots increases again. Each dot shows a point in time as one of the cell phones in the first shot made its way to the pizza restaurant. String these dots together and you can trace the route each customer took to reach the restaurant.
Move a slider representing time at the bottom of the screen and the number of yellow and purple dots increases. With enough time, the tracery of yellow dots marks out the road map of Florida. Add more time and it traces a road map of the eastern seaboard. Can you guess what lies at the end of those yellow brick roads? Little purple houses.
Right now, then, any random business owner can buy a map that leads from a customer at the register back to that person’s bedroom. It doesn’t take much to connect a point on the map to a street address; an address to a name. I’m sure this trivial step wouldn’t be necessary, though, because the data broker who provided the underlying phone data will gladly sell the phone number, too. Phone numbers leads to names and addresses; names lead to background checks, consumer profiles, credit reports, recent purchases, web history, likely political affiliations, social credit scores; one name to another name, a graph of connections leading from a dot on the map to the very essence of who you are – at least as far as data brokers can gather.
I think we all understand, in a cynical way, that this is happening. But seeing it, watching the private lives of people who simply wanted to eat pizza for lunch unfold on the screen before my eyes, cut through the veil of cynicism.
We are living in the worst case scenario. It is a frightening place to be.
(Note: The WordPress AI Assistant thought this post would be improved by the addition of tags like “short story,” “fiction,” or “science fiction.” I assure you, reader, AI and human alike, that this shit is non-fiction. – CBC)
C.B. Crenshaw 