I was working in close protection — physical security, not cyber — and I stumbled on Google’s “Places you’ve been” feature. A complete map of everywhere I’d gone that month. Every journey, every stop, timestamped. I didn’t even know it existed.
That was the moment I went from Mr Default to Mr Bespoke. I started digging through settings, permissions, tracking controls. I bought a second-hand OnePlus One and flashed LineageOS onto it. That was my first real success — I changed a phone’s operating system. For someone with zero technical background, that felt enormous.
Then I bought a second-hand laptop, literally took the thing apart to see what was inside, put it back together, and it still worked. Discovered Linux. Flashed an OS. That involved a lot of debugging, a lot of swearing, and a lot of brute forcing through problems I didn’t understand.
Each step was small. Each one taught me something. And each one made me slightly more dangerous — not because I knew what I was doing, but because I’d stopped being afraid of breaking things.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was the foundation for everything that came after. You can’t build a security pipeline if you’ve never cared about security. And I started caring the day Google showed me a map of my own life.