Most of us just use apps. Jane Manchun Wong flips open the bonnet, has a good look at what’s in there—and then tells the rest of us. Motivated by a desire to improve online security, as well as to alert the public to new services, she has been reverse engineering apps and revealing new features since 2017, and has become a bona fide geek celebrity for doing so. She has revealed hitherto unknown features of a host of the world’s leading apps, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google, Uber, Lyft and Airbnb, sharing them via Twitter.

She also works as a bug hunter, searching out security vulnerabilities for companies and disclosing them to those companies via so-called bug bounty programmes; she has been rewarded four times for finding critical bugs by Facebook, for example. A freelancer for her entire career to date, she is regularly offered jobs by tech companies—and by media companies keen on all the potential exclusives generated by her research.