November 9, 2025, 9:03pm 1

My household is under surveillance by law enforcement (in Canada) because of someone I share housing with. I will not speak of this person or their specific situation because it has nothing to do with me and I think they are being unfairly targeted. I’m not in a position where I can just move. I do live in a separate suite within the house and we do share utilities, including the internet.

I am not a suspect or part of their investigation and I am not doing anything illegal but I know for a fact there is a webcam watching my house and I am being followed. I suspect there could be trackers on my vehicle, that my home is bugged and my electronic devices could be monitored. I do not trust the investigation will be conducted lawfully and I do not want to be wrongly accused or implicated in whatever is or is not going on.

Our shared internet has been very unstable starting around the time this surveillance began. We’ve never had a problem with it in all the years before but since has been a constant source of frustration - despite changing service providers and equipment. I don’t understand how the internet works well enough to be sure if it is a problem with the service provider, router/modem setup or proximity, wifi signal, our devices or if something weird is going on related to the surveillance/harassment.

Some of our devices connect and some are consistently booted off the wifi network. My partner could connect to wifi with an older phone but my newer phone would not connect even when I turned off my vpn. None of our neighbours are experiencing problems with their internet. I’ve been mostly using my phone data or using it as a hotspot so I can use my computer.

I downloaded the free version of fing to my phone yesterday and detected some generic devices connected to my phone but my wifi network is unstable so I can’t investigate these connections to confirm if they are supposed to be there or not. Maybe it’s my square reader or bluetooth AirPods. I’m not quite sure how the app works, but when I traced one of the device connections, it said there were 30+ hops. What is a hop? How do I monitor my devices?

Obviously I need to figure out how to setup and secure my wifi as well as lock down and secure all my devices but my anxiety is making it difficult to make decisions on setup and software and how to organize my files. If I copy files to my external drive, will I be copying spyware/malware over as well?

I have an Apple watch (which I will probably ditch) and iPhone and PC laptop/desktop computers (with windows 11 - thinking of switching to Linux) and Apple TV box. I do have a subscription to protonVPN but need to confirm how many devices I can use it on. And I’m uncertain how to set things up in terms of connecting my phone to my computer and what devices I should keep compartmentalized.

How do I find out if there are trackers and bugs in my home and vehicle? I don’t even know where to start… I’m so overwhelmed. I do need to separate the real concern with my growing paranoia but I’ve never been in a situation like this before and I feel like I need to protect myself against this invasive surveillance for my own peace of mind. I don’t feel safe.

Can someone walk me through a step by step process to help me or provide some practical advice or guidance on where I should start? I would like to take reasonable precautions without going into tin hat territory.