It’s 8 on a Wednesday morning in January, and David Carroll’s Brooklyn apartment, a sunny, wood-beamed beauty converted from an old sandpaper factory, is buzzing.

His 10-year-old daughter, dressed in polka-dot pants, dips out the front door and off to school, Jansport backpack slung over her shoulders. His 5-year-old son darts into the living room in a luchador mask he picked up on the family’s holiday trip to Mexico. (His wrestling name, he tells me, is Diablo.) Carroll’s wife, Alex, who was unaware a reporter was coming to interview her husband this morning, hurries around picking up the detritus any family of four might leave behind in the morning rush and tucking away product samples from her job as a market researcher. There’s a crayon drawing on the coffee table, an intricate toy camping scene set up on the floor. And on the refrigerator, someone—I suspect the boy—has spelled out the word POOP in multicolored alphabet magnets.

For most everyone in Carroll’s bustling household, today is a morning like any other. Not for Carroll. This morning, he rolled out of bed at 6 am to news that the parent company of Cambridge Analytica, the now defunct international conglomerate, had pled guilty to criminal charges of disobeying a British data regulator.

The story of how the data analytics firm and former Trump campaign consultant misappropriated the Facebook data of tens of millions of Americans before the 2016 election is by now well known. But the company’s guilty plea wasn’t really about all those headlines you’ve seen splattered in the news over the past year. Instead, their crime was defying a government order to hand over all of the data they had ever collected on just one person: David Carroll.

For more than two years, Carroll, a professor of media design at The New School in Manhattan, has been on an obsessive, epically nerdy, and ultimately valuable quest to retrieve his data from Cambridge Analytica. During the 2016 election, when the firm worked for both the Trump campaign and senator Ted Cruz’s campaign, its leaders bragged openly about having collected thousands of data points to build detailed personality profiles on every adult in the United States. They said they used these profiles to target people with more persuasive ads, and when President Trump won the White House, they hungrily accepted credit.

A year ago, Carroll filed a legal claim against the London-based conglomerate, demanding to see what was in his profile. Because, with few exceptions, British data protection laws allow people to request data on them that’s been processed in the UK, Carroll believed that even as an American, he had a right to that information. He just had to prove it.

Carroll shuffles past me barefoot, a mug of coffee in one hand, his phone in the other. “Enjoy the moment,” he says, reading a message from his lawyer, Ravi Naik, who’s been feeding him updates from London all morning. About an hour later, an email floats into Carroll’s inbox from the British Information Commissioner’s Office, the regulator that brought the charges. Carroll turns his phone toward me to reveal the news. Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL, is being fined the equivalent of roughly $27,000. Carroll’s cut? About $222.

He couldn’t help but laugh. The sum is insignificant. The moment, anything but.

When he started out, Carroll was an underdog, facing off against a corporation with ties to the president of the United States and backed by billionaire donor Robert Mercer. If he lost, Carroll would be on the hook for the opposing team’s legal fees, which he wasn’t quite sure how he’d pay.