Ironically (or not), mine began with piracy. When I was little, I had no money, but I had a computer and lots of time. I figured out how to get games and apps that I wanted and a part of that was covering your tracks.

Fast forward to college and learning about Linux. It blew my mind that you could do something like apt-get install doom and then there it was. No piracy necessary. I dove head first into FOSS.

Then along came Google with lots of free stuff. Great, I thought, but this was different. I think I knew that they were harvesting and selling your personal data, but it was free so I let it go. One day, I was on a site and there was an advertisement for something very personal that I had been referenced in an email. The thing is - this was at my work computer which I never used my personal credentials for.

I started noticing things following me around the internet and got creeped out. I started reading about what’s really happening and got very uncomfortable. That’s when I started focusing more on keeping a clean profile.