I mean like people like parents/siblings/spouses/significant others/kids/roomates/housemates…
I mean, I have paranoia about other things too (such as germaphobia/mysophobia), but specifically on this issue of people snooping, is amongst one of my top fears, and I’m just curious if other have this similar fear/paranoia.
Like every time I wake up, I wonder if my parents or brother put some malware/spyware on my phone because they think its a funny prank or whatever.
Every time I enter my PIN for my phone, I always cover the screen before entering it in case my parents have cameras in the house. And even more so in public, I’d fear CCTV getting my PIN.
[No, I have not been diagnosed with schizophrenia, I don’t hallucinate or anything like that. (But I do have a diagnosis of depression.)]
[This is distinct from the common fears of government surveillance or whatever. That, strangely enough, I fear much less, since I’m just one in hundreds of millions of people that they would care about, so I’m not so worried about that.]
It already happened to me.
My old phone was on a Verizon family plan, with my family.
Problem: My dad is a QAnon nut who builds ghost guns in his garage.
Mom is a pushover, brain broken from a childhood of drug abuse.
Brother dropped out of high school to do drugs at raves, very emotionally unstable, 3 different times in my life I’ve had to drop everything to save him from becoming homeless and/or dying of an overdose, all occuring either when i was getting two bachelors degress simultaneously at the best uni in the state, or right after I graduated.
I up and left one day after getting sick of their bullshit. Just completely ghosted them after I couldn’t stand their bullshit anymore.
For the next two weeks, my brother keeps somehow showing up every 2 days, despite me being in locations I’ve never, ever been to before.
He is always in his car, slow crawling, looking at his phone, looking around, then panicking when he realizes I am staring at him, driving off.
Hrm. Turn off GPS? Nope, brother keeps showing up.
Call up Verizon explain what is going on, they say oh you’re not an authorized plan admin.
Huh. I was 2 weeks ago.
Root the phone, properly de google it.
My phone plan is then immediately cancelled, within a minute of booting up the phone again.
Call up Verizon (on a shitty grocery store sim card). Oh yeah your phone number was disabled by the admin, you have to contact them to enable it, no you cannot transfer the number to your own new plan, that’s all we can tell you.
… My family de listed me as an admin from the phone plan, enabled parental controls to literally stalk me, then disabled and froze my number/line after i uninstalled their ability to do that.
… This also had the fun side effect of locking me out of every single account that that I was using that number for with 2FA, so, no more banking for me!
If you think I’m nuts: This is just an optional feature in a Verizon family plan.
Works to approximate location even if the target phone doesn’t have the app installed on it.
https://www.verizon.com/support/verizon-family-faqs/
Obviously if you are stationary, and connected to a WiFi network with a known location, like a motel, or a library, or a coffee shop, you can narrow the pure cell tower triangulation error range, by a lot.
So uh yeah, if you have a Verizon family plan, you can easily be under realtime surveillance by whoever is the actual plan master.