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Good morning. As one of the one and a half billion users of the WhatsApp messaging system, it was unnerving to learn that hackers had exploited a flaw in the application’s security, and installed spyware which can turn a mobile phone into a surveillance system by activating its camera and microphone, tracking your movements, and seeing every message you write. In the hands of an authoritarian regime this becomes a serious tool of oppression. Although I did wonder what my hacked phone would reveal about my life. Group chats about which pub to watch the football at, an oversharing of opinions on things political, literary and musical. Whether John Snow deserved to be king in Game of Thrones. All in all. You’d know nothing. But the incident is a salutary reminder of how much of our privacy we entrust to those who may not have our best interests within their purview. And how careful we should be about what we share of ourselves online. Years ago, when the dangers of the new technology were not obvious, a friend who worked in tech advised me never to send a message that I wasn’t prepared for the whole world to see because, sure enough, the world would be able to see it. Technology has created a double bind. It facilitates communication to an amazing degree. We can send a message to anyone, anywhere, anytime. But it seems to be coming with an increase in surveillance that makes private communication risky. What to do? Leave that chat group? Throw away the phone and return to writing letters? Or do we become like footballers on the telly, speaking to each other with hands cupping our mouths for fear that others might we see what we’re saying? In a famous psalm an exhausted and oppressed David half-complains, half-rejoices in the truth that he is unable to escape the omniscient God he believes in. ‘Where can I hide from your spirit?’ he asks. He answers his own question by saying that he can’t and that perhaps it doesn’t matter. He knows that God’s gaze not only penetrates the rock of the cave in which he hides, it sees into his very soul. God is able to read his life, decrypt it end to end. The idea of being soul-hacked would be appalling if the one doing the hacking was a malignant force out to mine the data of our lives and use the information for their own ends to crush and oppress us. But as the Psalmist goes on to say: ‘Your eyes have seen my unformed substance.’ ‘Created my inmost being.’ He’s telling us we have nothing to fear. The One who cracks the encryption of our hearts, created the heart and gives us the code to open it. The One who is watching us, in this instance, is not against us but for us.