If 2024 hasn’t been discouraging enough, Ronan Farrow is here to confirm that your phone is spying on you

We’ve all been there. Sometimes, a targeted ad feels more like a heat-seeking missile that knows you better than your best friend, so much so that it makes you pause and wonder, “is my phone spying on me?” But you shake it off, thinking you’re just being paranoid.

Well, apparently, your phone actually can be spying on you. Luckily, Ronan Farrow is following up on this with an upcoming HBO documentary to break it all down. For shady business magnates, few statements are more intimidating than “Ronan Farrow is on the case,” because one thing is for sure: Farrow will get to the bottom of it.

One of the highlights of Farrow’s career was his crucial role in exposing and bringing down embattled Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein. But during that investigation, Farrow himself reportedly became a target of NSO Group’s spyware, Pegasus. While researching the Israeli company’s spyware, he discovered that Pegasus can completely take over a person’s phone without the owner ever knowing. Though NSO Group claims they only provide this spyware to governments for counterterrorism, Farrow — true to form — dug deeper and found it’s also used against journalists, activists, politicians, and even regular people.

As the saying goes, information is power, and it seems some are abusing their financial muscle by infiltrating our phones, extracting information in search of this power. We’re living in unprecedented times: politicians and industries overstep their bounds daily, and now through this spyware, they’ve seemingly found new ways to silence dissent. Farrow’s HBO documentary, Surveilled, scheduled for release on November 20, 2024, is a must-watch, as it promises to explore this issue affecting everyone’s privacy in depth.

What makes this situation feel so Orwellian is that it’s unclear if world leaders are even willing to protect the right to privacy. Day by day, the policies meant to shield us from big tech and authoritative regimes’ overreach are chipped away, leaving only an unwilling transparency in their place.

The Surveilled trailer suggests it will tackle these concerns, but for those familiar with Farrow’s work, there’s likely a bombshell hidden beyond what the trailer reveals — as there always is in Farrow’s investigations. In one clip, an interviewee ominously notes that the initial information they had at the beginning of their investigation was just the tip of the iceberg.

The fact that spywares like Pegasus are, as Farrow points out, mostly unregulated is truly eerie. It may be easy to dismiss the idea of strangers being able to access your phone at will — but consider this: we lock our phones with passwords we don’t share with even our best friends. Now imagine giving that access to a random person halfway across the world. 

Deadline reports that among the documentary’s participants will be top government officials like Rep. Jim Himes, celebrated New Yorker journalists, and even NSO Group members Leoz Michaelson and Omer Len. It seems the documentary aims to balance investigative findings with perspectives from every key figure involved. Viewers are sure to see a version of the world they never imagined outside of spy movies. The documentary is reported to be directed by Matthew O’Neill and Perri Peltz.