Act I — The Reckoning
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01
They Were Watching the Whole TimeI spent twenty years in cybersecurity tracking what adversaries do inside other people's networks. It took me an embarrassingly long time to look at what was happening inside my own.
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02
What Your Computer Is Doing Behind Your BackI went looking for the off switch. There wasn't one. That was the answer to a question I hadn't quite thought to ask yet.
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03
The Company That Knows You Better Than You Know YourselfI went looking at what Google had collected about me. Nothing shocked me. That, in itself, was the most unsettling part.
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04
You Are the ProductWindows collects data as a byproduct of a product you actually pay for. Facebook has no such separation — there's no version of the News Feed that isn't built entirely out of you.
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05
The Most Honest Liar in the RoomApple markets itself as the exception to everything in this series so far. In real, meaningful ways, that reputation is earned. It's also not the whole story.
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06
Everyone Is Doing ItTikTok, LinkedIn, and the data brokers nobody's heard of. This isn't a handful of bad actors. It's the entire business model.
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07
You Agreed to All of ItTerms of service nobody reads, dark patterns nobody notices, and the legal architecture that makes all of it technically voluntary. Now that you know, what do you call the agreement everyone supposedly made?
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08
There Are Two Ways Out — Both Are ValidSwitching your browser and calling it done is a real improvement. A home lab isn't more virtuous, just different. Act I is finished. Here's the fork, and which path this series takes from here.
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09
The Afternoon That Changes EverythingYour browser, your search engine, and the settings most people have never opened. A few hours, no technical skill required, and an honest look at which changes actually do the work.
About This Series
Escape Velocity is a twelve-part series documenting one security professional's journey out of the commercial technology ecosystem — and what he found on the other side. New articles roughly every two weeks. The series builds toward a practical, no-technical-skills-required path to a more private digital life — with a possible follow-up series down the road for readers who want to go further into self-hosting.
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