Someone can watch your browsing without any spyware - through Chrome's sync feature

Two unattended minutes with your unlocked phone is all it takes. Security firm Certo published research on July 15 describing a form of digital stalking that abuses a feature built right into Chrome - sync - and installs no malware whatsoever, which is exactly what makes it so hard to spot.

The move is simple. Someone opens Chrome on your device, adds their own Google account, and switches sync on. From that moment, everything Chrome syncs - your browsing history, the sites you visit, and any passwords you've saved in the browser - quietly copies to their account, readable from any device, anywhere. They never needed your Google password, because they signed in with theirs. Certo describes a woman whose partner saw her searches for a family lawyer and domestic-violence support within days of her making them. There's no app to hunt down and delete, because nothing was installed.

Checking takes under a minute. On a PC or Android phone, open Chrome, tap your profile picture at the top right, and look at the account listed under "You and Google." On an iPhone, it's the three-dot menu, then Settings, right at the top. If there's an account you don't recognise, sign it out or remove it - and if it had been sitting there a while, change the passwords for anything that matters, since they may have synced across too.

The wider point is that a few minutes with an unlocked device is its own kind of break-in, so lock your phone with a PIN or your face and don't leave it open on the table. Tendvane's Privacy & accounts check works in the same spirit on your PC, giving you one clear place to review the accounts and sign-ins tied to the machine so anything you didn't add yourself has somewhere to show up.