Last updated 2026-08-23 ｜ Jurisdiction Taiwan
If you are in immediate danger, call 110 (police, Taiwan). For protective services, counselling or emergency shelter, call 113 (Taiwan's 24-hour protection hotline).
If you are not in Taiwan, the hotline numbers and statutes on this page do not apply to you. See section 7 for how to find the equivalent services where you live.
Before you read this page
If you suspect your phone or accounts are being monitored, do not read this page, search for help, or contact anyone from that phone.
Stalkerware and account-level surveillance can see your browsing history, search terms and messages. The act of looking for help can itself tell the other person that you have realised what is happening — and research on intimate partner violence consistently finds that the point at which a victim begins to act is the point of highest danger.
Use someone else's device, a public computer, or a library terminal instead.
There is a quick exit button at the top of this page. It leaves immediately, and your browser's back button will not return here.
1. Emergency and support channels (Taiwan)
| Situation | Channel |
|---|---|
| Immediate physical danger | 110 (police) |
| Domestic violence, sexual assault, child protection; counselling or shelter | 113 protection hotline (24h) |
| Reporting a stalking or harassment case | Women and Children Protection Police Corps at your local police department |
| Fraud, money taken | 165 anti-fraud hotline |
| Legal advice | Local bar association; Legal Aid Foundation |
| Personal-data breach complaint | The organisation's data-protection contact; the competent authority |
| Locating a person, civil evidence gathering | A licensed investigation agency; retain a lawyer |
The Women and Children Protection Police Corps is the unit that specialises in stalking and domestic violence cases. Saying explicitly that your case involves stalking makes it more likely to be handled by officers familiar with this type of case.
2. Three principles
Most technical guides stop at helping you find the tracker or the monitoring app. But the moment you find it is where the real difficulty begins. The order of the three principles below cannot be reversed.
2.1 Physical safety comes before evidence
Before touching any device, make one judgement: will the other person notice that the surveillance has stopped working, and will that make them more dangerous?
Once a tracker is removed or shielded, location reporting stops. Once a monitoring app is deleted, data reporting stops. To the person doing the monitoring, both are unmistakable signals.
If you judge that they may escalate, the reasonable choice is to leave things as they are for now, contact 113 or the police to work out a safety plan, and deal with the technical side once support is in place.
Cleaning up the technology does not make you safe. Evidence matters, but safety comes first.
2.2 Do not remove, reset or discard it immediately
The most common mistake is to discard, smash or factory-reset the device in the first moments of shock or anger.
- A tracker: resetting it wipes its link to the owner's account — and that link is the key connection back to the person responsible.
- A phone: a factory reset is the most thorough clean-up available, and equally the most thorough destruction of evidence.
- A monitoring app: deleting it also destroys the install time, the permissions it held, and the subscription payment trail.
Complete the evidence preservation in section 3 first.
2.3 The order of clean-up cannot be reversed
If the phone itself is compromised, changing your password on that phone hands the new password straight to the other person.
The same applies to account recovery: if the recovery email address or phone number is still under their control, a new password can be reset within minutes.
Clean-up has to start from a device you know is clean, and the email account has to be recovered first — it is the recovery route for everything else. The full sequence is in the reports linked in section 6.
3. Preserving evidence
Store every record somewhere other than the device under examination.
3.1 If you found a physical tracker
- Photograph it where it is, both the wider scene and close-ups, so the photographs show where it was concealed;
- Record the time and place: date and time of discovery, and exactly where it was (which part of the vehicle, which compartment of the bag);
- Record the device details: appearance, serial number, any visible identifiers; if your phone can read information from it, screenshot that too;
- Leave it as it is: do not reset it, take it apart, or remove the battery;
- If you need to interrupt its function without damaging it, place it in an opaque container;
- Write down your own movements over the period the device may have been recording — this helps establish the scope and duration of the intrusion.
3.2 If you found phone or account monitoring
- Screenshots of the suspicious app or setting, including its full name and the permissions it holds;
- Screenshots of account sign-in history, including device names, times and locations;
- Subscription and billing records — commercial monitoring services have to be paid for, and the money trail is among the strongest evidence available;
- A correlation log: dates, what the other person turned out to know, and where you actually were;
- If possible, have someone film you operating the device on a second device, to show the screenshots were not fabricated afterwards.
4. Legal routes in Taiwan
The following outlines the conduct these statutes address. It is not legal advice; how the law applies to your case is for a lawyer to assess.
Stalking and Harassment Prevention Act
Covers repeated or persistent stalking and harassment, including using electronic communications, the internet or other equipment to persistently monitor, follow or track a specific person. Using a tracker to follow someone's movements, or monitoring software to read their messages, both fall within the conduct this Act addresses.
A victim may report the matter to the police; following investigation a written warning may be issued to the offender, and if they offend again within two years of that warning, a protection order may be sought from the court.
Criminal Code — offences against privacy
Recording another person's non-public activities, conversations, speech or private body parts without justification, by audio, photographic, video or electromagnetic means, is subject to penalties (Article 315-1 addresses peeping at, eavesdropping on, or recording another person's non-public activities using tools or equipment without justification).
Criminal Code — offences against computer security
Unauthorised access to another person's computer or related equipment, unauthorised acquisition or alteration of another person's electromagnetic records, and producing programs specifically for committing offences under this chapter, are all subject to penalties.
Personal Data Protection Act
Unlawful collection, processing or use of personal data that is liable to cause harm to another person carries corresponding liability.
Domestic Violence Prevention Act
Where the parties are family members or intimate partners, a protection order may be sought; its provisions include prohibiting the offender from harassing or stalking the victim.
5. Preparing to report
- Go to the Women and Children Protection Police Corps, or state explicitly when reporting that the case involves stalking and domestic violence;
- Bring the evidence preserved under section 3;
- Keep the original device — it must not be reset or discarded beforehand;
- If you have applied for or obtained a protection order, bring it as well.
6. Full methodology and further reading
This page is a summary of what to do and where to turn. For the full threat models, the layered detection methodology and the limits of each layer, see our two research reports:
- WP-001 Silent Companions — Detecting and Responding to Bluetooth Tracker Abuse
- WP-002 The Informant in Your Pocket — Detecting and Responding to Stalkerware
Both are free to read in full, and available as PDFs.
7. If you are not in Taiwan
The hotline numbers and statutes on this page apply to Taiwan only.
The Coalition Against Stalkerware maintains a list of support organisations across many countries, searchable by where you are: https://stopstalkerware.org/resources/
What this page is
This page draws together published statutes, support channels announced by government agencies, and our own published research.
It is not legal advice, and it cannot replace the professional judgement of a lawyer, a social worker or a police officer. Odysec is an independent research team. We hold no investigative or enforcement powers, and we do not file reports, gather evidence or conduct litigation on anyone's behalf. The team's limits are set out in Scope and Boundaries.
If you find anything on this page that is wrong or out of date, please write to contact@odysec.org.