articles
China Elevator Stories
Spyware: The Hidden Threat in Your Phone
Spyware can be used to stalk and surveil you, and it has been found to be used on a massive scale.
28/05/2025
Ruth Silbermayr
Author
Spyware is sometimes used by governments, but it can also be used by individuals. A few years ago, I found myself being followed by a stranger in Austria, as described here. I assumed my former husband had sent someone to follow me in Austria, either to surveil my whereabouts—or worse, to have me killed.
When a fire broke out in a café right next to our apartment, I soon forgot about the incident. Interestingly, though, the fire occurred while I was at home. I was the only one there—my sister and her former husband were both out.
Later, another fire broke out in the garbage room of my apartment compound—this was at a different address where I had moved—shortly after I had reestablished contact with my children over video. During those calls, my ex-husband was watching in the background while we spoke. I believe he also monitored me walking home from the nearby subway station, possibly assessing the area for vulnerabilities—perhaps even to plan the second fire. Fortunately, no one in the building was harmed. The garbage room was only rebuilt many months later, shortly before I moved to China.
Although my ex-husband never directly admitted involvement, he inadvertently revealed more than he intended.
A few weeks before the second fire, during our divorce proceedings in a court in Vienna’s 22nd district (where I had been living), he told the judge that he had hired someone to deliver a letter to the court’s mailbox. He insisted it was a one-time act and claimed to have no further contact with the individual.
This reflects a clear pattern in his behavior: hiring strangers in Vienna to carry out tasks for him. He hired someone to deliver that letter, just as I suspect he hired people to follow me—and possibly to start the fires.
The second fire occurred on a Saturday morning while I was asleep at home. My ex-husband is extremely analytical and calculated in his actions—he stalks in what can only be described as a disturbingly professional manner. He’s careful not to leave evidence, but he occasionally reveals too much, such as referencing something he couldn’t possibly know unless he had been spying on me.
When I once lost my job, he started asking about my employment situation the very next day. When I was applying for a new job and one potential employer invited me to teach at an English corner once a week, he suddenly brought up the idea of having me practice English with our younger son during video calls. After I visited a Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) practitioner, he began speaking negatively about TCM the very next day, calling practitioners corrupt and money-driven—even though I hadn’t told him I’d gone. The practitioner had prescribed me a herbal concoction, which I had picked up just the day before.
I knew he was accessing my phone and computer based on patterns like these. He never admitted to using spyware, but his behavior gave him away—just not in an overt way.
This story might sound like something out of a thriller, but it’s real. When you’re dealing with a psychopath, you’re dealing with a psychopath—diagnosed or not. Most psychopaths go undiagnosed because they would never voluntarily seek psychological evaluation. In China, such evaluations would take place in so-called “neurological hospitals” (if I remember the name correctly)—a place people like him would never visit.
Ronan Farrow, an American journalist, has investigated spyware extensively. He has given several interviews revealing how spyware is used not just against journalists and dissidents, but also ordinary citizens. He himself was targeted. As a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and New Yorker contributor, he says:
“Trump and his associates have explicitly threatened journalists with prosecution, and specifically threatened journalists who protect their sources with prosecution. That is dangerous for democracy. This is one of the first times… and I am… as we discuss… someone who has dealt with a fair number of surveillance and intimidation efforts. And I felt frightened to work in this country. I think in this incoming administration, we’re going to need the work of journalists more than ever, and we’re going to need the space for journalism, for dissent, for all of the spaces that are shrunk and cracked down on when you have this technology freely used in an unfettered way. And we have just seen this horror story play out in one country after another, even where there are ostensible protections in place. We see how hard it is to get accountability after the fact. We see how tempting it is for law enforcement to overreach and start to target people in a vindictive, politicized way.”
In another interview, Farrow expands on the scale and impact of spyware:
“We see it show up on the phones of people around murdered dissidents, journalists, it’s been linked to hundreds of acts of violence around the world. But what I have been tracking in recent years of my reporting, is that in one Western democracy after another, countries that supposedly have protections against these kinds of intrusions in their bodies of law, we are also seeing scandals in which this kind of surveillance technology is overused. We’ve seen it happen in Poland, in Greece, in Spain, and a lot of this documentary, “Surveilled”, is actually set in Spain, where we document one of the largest clusters on record of peaceful civil society members and opposition politicians being hacked in this way. And I can tell you, Michelle, from my own experience, being followed around, surveilled in various ways, including sometimes high-tech ways where someone was following me around, tracking my GPS data, it is not just information gathering, it is intimidation. And it shrinks the space for opposition expression of all kinds. So it is something we should all just really be concerned about.”
In my own life, these forms of intimidation, stalking, and suppression of dissenting voices have become far too common. I’ve repeatedly encountered people—often men, sometimes associated with incel ideology—who try to silence me simply for having my own opinions. I’ve been discouraged from blogging, pressured not to be single, and surveilled by individuals who wrongly believed they had a right to intrude on my life.
One persistent stalker who had monitored all my private conversations later reported me to the police. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said that I want no contact with him, or asserted my right to privacy. Still, he continued trying to intimidate me into silence, expecting me to give up my boundaries while he gave no information about himself in return.
This is intimacy stalking—stalking someone within their most private sphere, pretending you have the right to enter their life. But you don’t. No one does.
Even in times of political or social upheaval, human rights still apply. They don’t vanish just because someone in power—or an abuser—chooses to ignore them. Human rights are universal. You can try to undermine them, you can write oppressive laws—but they still stand. Just because someone like Hitler didn’t honor them doesn’t mean they lost their validity. They are always in force, even if violated.
Have you ever been spied on with spyware?