How smart tech let my abusive husband control my every move: Seven cameras positioned around the house. Alerts on his smart watch for every penny she spent. And each step outside tracked via GPS

• Isabella’s husband subjected her to coercive control using smart technology 
• READ MORE: Mother-of-two tells how abusive former boyfriend hacked into smart speaker to listen to conversations

Rarely was anything I wanted to search for on my smartphone contentious. But it was only lying in bed at night, under the duvet, that I felt my scrolling wouldn’t be monitored.

During the day I was captured on camera if I so much as sat on my sofa or tended to the dahlias in the garden. 

When I bought a bottle of olive oil, the purchase was passed on via my online bank account in notification form. Even walking my dog, I was under surveillance.

The spy tracking my every move? The man sleeping next to me.

My husband David’s use of smart technology was designed to control and intimidate, from the seven cameras he installed in our home and the shared Apple ‘cloud’ that stored our data, to his smartwatch tracking my financial transactions and the ‘Find My Friends’ app on our phones that revealed where I was at all times.

Isabella’s husband David’s used smart technology to control and intimidate her, subjecting her to coercive control 

Over our 15-year relationship, what started as his seemingly innocent use of technology slowly turned sinister, until I was reduced to an anxious wreck. 

To the outside world, my husband was charming, our privileged lives in a picturesque village enviable. 

Nobody would have guessed that behind closed doors he was calling me a ‘worthless c***’, wrongly accusing me of cheating and physically assaulting me if I refused to let him read my WhatsApps. If I ever mentioned leaving him, he threatened to kill himself.

David’s efforts to violate me, to eradicate every ounce of privacy and control I had over my own life, were made all the easier by the technology at his disposal. 

So I wasn’t surprised when, last month, the Government’s Culture, Media and Sport Committee announced that home security systems, baby monitors and fitness trackers were among the devices contributing to tech-enabled domestic abuse.

With an average of nine ‘smart’ products in every home — using AI, machine learning and data analysis, supposedly to make our lives easier — MPs warned they are being exploited to ‘monitor, harass, coerce and control’, with the ‘vast majority’ of abuse cases featuring some sort of cyber element.

Indeed, just this month, retired builder Michael William admitted stalking his retired head teacher wife Belinda at Southampton magistrates’ court by putting a tracker in her car boot. William was given a restraining order and 12-month community order.

I did leave David in the end, but his surveillance of me was so extreme I had to cut the power in our house so he wouldn’t capture me doing it. 

Even now, after divorcing him for coercive control — a way of making a partner feel dependent, isolated and scared — I shake as I relive the emotional devastation.

So how did I, a professional 40-something, come to be controlled like this?

David installed the ‘Find My Friends’ app on their phones so that he would know where Isabella was at all times 

Perhaps the signs were always there. David and I had been friends since university, but it was only in our late 20s that he became flirtatious, messaging me daily to tell me I was beautiful and lavishing me with presents.

Now, I realise the onslaught of attention was an attempt to control, but at the time, I was flattered, and when he kissed me at the end of a restaurant dinner I decided our solid friendship was an ideal basis for a relationship.

In 2008, before the technology to track people online became commonplace, David obsessed over my Facebook account. He asked who male friends who ‘tagged’ me were, and what we’d been doing.

‘He looks like he’s flirting with you,’ David said. Back then, his concerned advice made sense — embarrassed about the party-girl image I might be projecting as a professional woman, I’d delete the posts.

I now see that other behaviour should have sounded an alarm. Out with friends, he hovered intently if a man tried to talk to me. They found his focus unsettling; David told me they didn’t have my best interests at heart. 

A mutual distrust between him and my friends grew and, since he seemed to be giving me all the attention I needed, it felt easier to stop socialising as much.

Within months David had moved into my house and ditched his sales career to be a marketing executive like me — another red flag, perhaps, although at the time I thought it meant we’d have more in common.

One afternoon in 2014, he came home with a recently launched ‘smart doorbell’ with a camera that activated when it detected motion, alerting its owner to any activity via a notification on their smartphone.

So all-encompassing was David’s surveillance that Isabella had to use her work laptop to book an appointment with a psychologist

‘It’ll help keep the house safe,’ he said, not unreasonably. Yet as the months passed, he began referring to my appearances on it. ‘You were home late,’ he would say. ‘Where had you been?’

‘Was that a delivery driver you opened the door to?’ he’d ask over dinner. I hardly thought being stuck in traffic or receiving a parcel warranted a discussion but put David’s queries down to insecurity and answered patiently.

Soon after, he suggested we open a joint bank account. Why not? We earned a similar wage, and shared bills, after all. What I wasn’t expecting was for David to link our current account to his Apple watch, so every time I shopped, he was alerted.

‘Why the new pillowcases?’ he’d ask when he came home from work. Or, during the day, I’d get a text: ‘Has our bank account been hacked or have you bought new table mats?’

He seemed increasingly paranoid about our household finances, so when he said he’d ‘allocate’ me money for our household budget, I agreed. 

Anything to assuage his anxiety, I thought, even as I found myself withdrawing cash rather than putting purchases on our card to maintain some semblance of financial independence.

When David proposed in 2016, I accepted. By now I was in my late 30s and trying for a family. I was too invested in our relationship to acknowledge my nagging doubts, and hopeful the commitment might make him question my feelings for him less.

Instead, his paranoia spiralled. Every male colleague I mentioned, every repairman he watched arrive while he was out, became a potential threat. ‘He likes you,’ turned into ‘Are you cheating on me?’ and I began to realise David wasn’t concerned about security: he wanted to keep tabs on me.

Retired builder Michael William (pictured) admitted stalking his retired head teacher wife Belinda at Southampton magistrates’ court by putting a tracker in her car boot

I tried to reassure him there was no need — I loved him. He responded with extravagant gifts and the insistence he simply wanted to keep me safe. 

I didn’t dare tell my parents, who thought he was the perfect son-in-law, or the friends I’d alienated, who he had proved right. I felt increasingly isolated.

Having already asked the few colleagues I still occasionally saw socially for coffee not to ‘check in’ with me on Facebook posts and reveal my whereabouts — ‘my husband gets funny about where I am,’ I joked awkwardly — I came off social media altogether in 2017 to avoid David’s relentless questioning.

I started entering our detached house through the garden back door so I wouldn’t set off the camera, but when David found out, he put cameras there too, thanking me for highlighting the security flaw.

‘What if we get burgled?’ he’d ask. I told him our garden was my sanctuary, and I didn’t like the feeling of a camera capturing me pottering, whatever the reason.

‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, adding four extra cameras around the eaves of our house so the entire perimeter was under surveillance in 2018.

In tears of incredulity, I finally lost my patience and asked him why he had to know where I was all the time.

Something inside him seemed to flip. It was 3 pm and he stormed off to lie on our bed, staying there for hours, motionless and refusing to speak. Shocked, I felt I’d done something wrong.

My guilt was compounded the next morning, when he started to cry and said he’d kill himself if I left him. Distraught, I promised that would never happen. At that moment, he must have known he’d won: he could control and I would forgive.

His long, sullen silences became weekly occurrences, punctuated with verbal abuse. When, one morning over breakfast, I said I didn’t have enough in the budget for cleaning products, David snapped.

Isabella had to shut off the power in the entire house at the fuse box — the only way she could turn the cameras off — in order to escape without David being alerted 

‘What do you need more money for, you ungrateful c***,’ he said, before storming out of the room, leaving me standing shocked in the kitchen.

Later, when he acted as if nothing had happened, I told him I wouldn’t tolerate being spoken to like that. He said if I left nobody else would want me, because I was ‘worthless and stupid’.

Collapsing into tears in the bathroom, I believed him. I’d been brainwashed into thinking I’d be nothing without him; that he’d die by suicide, and I’d be responsible.

I’d given him my Apple ID password when we moved in together so he could see my photos on our shared Mac computer — he rarely took pictures and it seemed a way of celebrating our relationship.

Now, he used the few pictures I still took against me, asking who the male colleague was in a picture I took of a group of us in the park at lunchtime. ‘Why didn’t you say you’d gone out with him?’ he asked the second I came home, before refusing to speak to me for the rest of the day.

He started opening my post, under the pretext of ‘helping’. He monitored everything I searched for online. 

When he found a hotel I’d searched to investigate their car parking for a work conference, he refused to believe I wasn’t going away with a lover. 

‘I knew you were being unfaithful,’ he yelled as he stood over me while I logged into my work laptop to show the company’s travel booking. His anger, this time, was followed by sobbing apologies.

Isabella was even tracked when she was out walking her dog. When she was told one day that she had ventured too far from home, it was a turning point in her and David’s marriage

In 2019, after I started working from home, the situation took an even more nightmarish twist. David installed cameras connected to his phone in our living room and kitchen. ‘For if the outdoor cameras fail,’ he said, my stomach churning with anxiety and anger. 

I wasn’t allowed to spend £5 on moisturiser, yet he was spending hundreds on technology to track me.

It’s a strange feeling, being watched, as if those cameras aren’t just registering your movements, but scrutinising your soul; silently judging, monitoring, weaponising everything you do.

At my laptop at the kitchen table, I felt violated. Sitting on the sofa, I couldn’t relax. ‘You didn’t have lunch today — you must have been working hard,’ David would say, and I knew he’d watched the whole day’s camera footage on fast forward.

Twice, when I refused to show him innocuous messages from colleagues on WhatsApp — the only form of communication he couldn’t access via my Apple ID — he shoved me across the room in a rage. 

Those assaults were his only behaviour that I registered as abuse, yet weren’t regular enough for me to think to seek help.

The stress made me stop eating and my weight plummeted to 8 st. Our attempts to start a family had failed, and by 2021, when David said we should track each other on Find My Friend, the app automatically available to iPhone users, I felt too weak to object.

Being told via text message as I walked my dog — the one activity I still found solace in — I’d gone too far from home was, with hindsight, a turning point in our marriage, an invasion too far.

But David had chipped away at my confidence to the extent that it still didn’t compute that I wasn’t somehow to blame.

I needed an outside opinion. Knowing there would be ramifications, one morning last year I left my phone at home so David couldn’t track me as I drove to a psychologist’s appointment I’d made on my work laptop, so he wouldn’t see it. There, I spilled the full extent of David’s surveillance for the first time to a stranger.

She said I was being subjected to coercive control, a term I’d barely given any thought to.

Abusers, in my mind, were physically violent. I cried tears of relief as I realised I wasn’t going crazy. 

After returning home to dozens of missed calls and texts from a furious David, to whom I pretended I’d left my phone at home while shopping, I knew I had to leave before my mind was destroyed.

The next day, on the pretext of visiting them to drop off a present, I told my parents everything. Holding me as I sobbed, we agreed I’d move into their house and set up a bank account registered at their address.

Only when she was in bed at night could Isabella use her phone without worrying that her scrolling was being monitored by her husband 

To retrieve mementoes I feared David would destroy in rage once I’d left, I pretended I was dusting the cameras, taking photo albums out of drawers in seconds before returning them to their position.

A week later, shortly after David had left for work, I shut off the power in the entire house at the fuse box — the only way I could turn the cameras off.

Almost immediately, he called. ‘There’s been a power cut,’ I told him as breezily as I could, heart hammering, before leaving my phone on the sofa, in case it tracked me running up and down the drive as I bundled my bags into the car.

Before I closed the door to our home for the last time, I deleted David from Find My Friend and turned my phone off. He’d already called my parents by the time I reached their house, 20 miles away. 

Dad told him I’d left, and not to contact me. The next day I turned on my phone to a barrage of messages. ‘You’re a b****. You’ve ruined my life,’ he said.

A month later, I filed for divorce, a judge accepting my lawyer’s argument that David’s cameras, financial monitoring and tracking constituted coercive control.

I was advised to report David to the police, but, still crushed, I couldn’t face the prospect of seeing him in court.

I am slowly rebuilding my confidence, but the legacy of his abuse lingers. Even now, when I see a camera, I sometimes wonder who’s watching — and why.

• Names have been changed

• Interview by Antonia Hoyle

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