You Are Not Alone.

I kept getting notifications on my iPhone saying ‘AirTag Found Moving With You.’ I thought it was a glitch. My ex and I had broken up six months prior, and I had moved to a new apartment he didn’t know about. But he kept showing up at the coffee shop near my new place. I finally took my car to a mechanic. They found it taped inside the rear wheel well. He had been tracking my speed, my location, everything.

I blocked her on everything. Phone, Instagram, LinkedIn. But she would send me $0.01 on Venmo with messages like ‘I know you’re at the bar’ or ‘Who is that girl?’. I didn’t realize that my transaction history was public by default. She was mapping my social life by seeing who I paid for dinner or drinks. It felt like no matter what digital door I locked, she found a window I didn’t know was open.

It started small. The heat would turn up to 80 degrees in the middle of the night. The lights would flash. I thought the house was haunted. It turns out my ex-husband still had admin access to our Google Home account. He was watching me through the kitchen hub camera and controlling the environment to make me feel crazy. It’s called gaslighting, but using technology to do it made it feel terrifyingly inescapable.

We went on two dates. I said I wasn’t interested. A week later, my boss calls me in. Someone had emailed HR claiming I was stealing company data. Then came the fake reviews on my professional portfolio. She wasn’t just trying to date me; she was trying to destroy my livelihood to force me to pay attention to her. It took a forensic tech expert to link the IP addresses back to her.

I did everything right. I moved states. I got an unlisted number. But within two weeks of signing a lease, my new address was on Whitepages.com for $0.99. My stalker just set up a Google Alert for my name. Every time I moved, the data brokers updated his map. It felt like the internet was conspiring to get me killed.

My parents loved my boyfriend. He gave me a new iPhone for my birthday. It was a generous gift, or so I thought. He had jailbroken it and installed keylogging software before wrapping it. He read every text I sent to my friends about how scared I was of his temper. He knew I was planning to leave before I even packed a bag.

He didn’t hit me. He hit my credit score. He knew my social security number from our tax returns. He opened five credit cards in my name and maxed them out, then stopped paying. When I tried to rent an apartment to escape him, I was denied everywhere. He stalked me by keeping me too poor to leave.

An anonymous user on a gaming forum decided he didn’t like me. He found my address through a data leak. One night, a SWAT team broke down my door because he called in a fake hostage situation. Stalking isn’t just following someone; it’s weaponizing the police against them from a thousand miles away.

My neighbor bought a drone. At first, it seemed like a toy. Then I noticed it hovering outside my bathroom window on the second floor. He wasn’t flying it for fun; he was using it to peer into rooms that even my blinds couldn’t fully cover. The buzz of that motor still gives me panic attacks.

My ex created fake profiles of me on dating apps. She used my real photos but wrote horrible, offensive things in the bio. Random men started messaging me, angry. It ruined my reputation in my small town. People thought I was a monster because of words I never wrote.

He sent flowers to my office every hour on Valentine’s day. My coworkers thought it was romantic. They didn’t know he had threatened to kill me the night before. The flowers weren’t a gift; they were a signal that he knew where I was and that he could get to me, even with security at the front desk.

I take the 7:15 bus. A man started sitting behind me. Then next to me. Then he started getting off at my stop, even though there are no offices there. One day he tried to follow me into my apartment lobby. I had to change my entire commute, adding 40 minutes to my day just to feel safe.

My phone would ring, and the caller ID would show my own number. Or my mom’s number. I’d answer, thinking it was an emergency, and it would be him, breathing or laughing. Caller ID spoofing took away my ability to screen calls. Every ring became a source of terror.

I came home and my back gate was open. My golden retriever was limping. The vet said she had been kicked. My ex knew she was my world. He didn’t touch me, but he knew hurting her would hurt me more. It was a warning shot. I moved out the next day.

I run the same route every morning. I post my times on Strava. I didn’t realize my profile was public. A woman I barely knew started waiting for me at mile marker 3. She knew exactly when I’d be there. I had to go private and change my route entirely.

He sued me for everything. Defamation, custody, small claims for a couch. I spent every penny I had on lawyers. He knew he would lose every case, but the point wasn’t winning. The point was forcing me to see him in court and bankrupting me so I couldn’t rebuild my life.

Every time we swapped the kids, he’d slip a new tracker into their backpacks. He’d call me asking why I was at the mall or who I was seeing. I had to search my own children like criminals every time they came home just to ensure my privacy. It broke my heart.

I woke up and my iCloud was empty. Years of photos, contacts, notes—gone. Then I got a text: ‘Now you have nothing, just like me.’ My ex had guessed my security questions. It wasn’t just data loss; it was the erasure of my history.

He wasn’t a romantic interest. He was a client I rejected. He started endorsing me on LinkedIn, viewing my profile daily, and commenting on every post. Then he showed up at a conference I was speaking at, sitting in the front row, staring. Professional networks are scary because you can’t just go private.

I’m a bartender. A regular started staying until close every night. He’d offer to walk me to my car. I said no. Then he started waiting by my car. He knew my shifts better than I did. I had to quit my job and find work in a different part of the city.