Spyware and smartphones used by abusive men to track their partners
Smartphones' software allows them to follow the other person's movements, monitor their calls, texts and emails - and even watch them
Out for dinner on an overseas business trip thousands of kilometres from her home in Britain, Isobel answered her mobile expecting to speak to her children.
Instead, she heard the voice of her estranged husband, whom she was in the process of divorcing after years of violence in which she had been punched, kicked, strangled, pulled around by her hair and also thrown down the stairs.
"Before the children came on the line, he told me exactly where I was - which city, in which country, and which restaurant I was sitting in," she says. "I was absolutely beside myself. I was just so overwhelmed with fear, wondering how the hell he could pinpoint me like this. I asked how he knew and he said: 'I can find you on your iPhone'."
Mark had bought the phone for Isobel, who is in her 40s and set it up before she had left him. It seems most likely he was using the geolocation services built into all smartphones; if you know, or can guess, the password to someone's cloud account, you can follow their movements constantly via the software designed to find lost or stolen phones that comes installed on many devices.
That isn't all a smartphone offers if you want to monitor someone's activity. Spyware allows you to listen in to and record calls, read texts, see photos and even watch your subject via their phone's camera. Last week, Catharine Higginson, a 45-year-old teacher from Surrey, revealed how her husband James had been tracking her texts and conversations via an app on her phone. She was initially shocked, she said, but didn't see it as spying - instead interpreting James's actions as a mark of his concern for her well-being.
Higginson may be happy with her lot, but there are growing numbers of women, like Isobel, for whom the opportunities offered by smartphones for tracking and surveillance are nothing short of terrifying.
Abusers are increasingly using this technology, say domestic violence charities. "For women experiencing domestic violence, these technologies can be used to further terrorise and intimidate them," says Sandra Horley, the chief executive of Refuge, which helps people deal with domestic violence.
"Online tools and mobile technologies can provide yet another way for perpetrators to exert power and control over women," she said.
A Women's Aid survey found that 41 per cent of respondents' partners or ex-partners used their online activities to track their actions.
Refuges, whose locations are kept closely guarded for the safety of their users, now often warn women fleeing abuse to check their phones for apps that might be spyware and to switch off location services before they arrive. Tracey Noble, refuge manager for The Dash (Domestic Abuse Stops Here) Charity in east Berkshire and south Buckinghamshire, has seen at least three women in the past year who came from other refuges because they had been found there by their abusers via their phones.
New technology is being developed so quickly, and social media pervades so many aspects of our lives, that it is hard to stay ahead, says Jennifer Perry, the chief executive of the Digital Trust, which supports victims of digital abuse.
In fact, spyware, she reckons, is "yesterday's technology" for tracking victims: "The easiest thing is to access the woman in the cloud.
"He knows the username and password.
"You have women who don't even realise they have a cloud account in their smartphone.
"There is also an app you can buy that mirrors the phone on to a PC," Perry says. "The man can just sit at his computer and watch everything that happens on the phone."
