Allegations of a spy program known as Pegasus being used to track journalists, activists - and even political leaders - indicate that online surveys are now on the market for sale.
The company that owns the app, the NSO Group has denied the allegations and says its customers are being scrutinized.
But it is another sign that high-level intelligence tactics, which were once the exclusive reserve of a few states, are now becoming more widespread and challenging the way we think about privacy and security in the online world.
In the past, if the security service wanted to know what you were doing, it took a concerted effort. They can get a certificate to track your contact by phone. Or they planted a plant in your home. Or they sent a monitoring team to follow you.
Knowing who you are communicating with the most and how you live your life and it often requires patience and time.
Now, almost everything they would like to know - what you say, where you are, who you meet, even what you love most - are all on the device we walk around with all the time.
Your phone can be accessed remotely without anyone touching it and you may not know that it has been diverted from you until network technicians do their spying.
The ability to access the phone remotely was considered something that few governments could do.
But high-level intelligence and surveillance forces are now in the hands of many other countries and even individuals and small groups.
Former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden unveiled the power of US and British intelligence agencies to enter global communications in 2013.
These organizations have always argued that their power was under the control and control of a democratic country.
These approvals were weak at the time, but have been strengthened ever since.
Its revelation, however, caused other nations to focus on what was possible.
Israel has always had first-rate network power and high monitoring capabilities.
And its companies, like the NSO, often formed by veterans of the intelligence world, have been among those selling such tactics.
The NSO group says they only sell their software for use against criminals and terrorists. But the problem is how you define those elements.
Iron-handed countries often accuse journalists, opposition politicians, and human rights activists of being criminals or a threat to national security, so they monitor them closely through networks and other means.
In most countries there is little or no legal accountability and oversight over control of the capacity and monitoring force used.
The proliferation of terrorist attacks but also the widespread political criticism has increased the pace of many governments' access to private communication devices.
In the past, telecommunications companies were required to monitor the conversations of a person to whom the administration wanted information (here the person was connecting cables to a telephone line in order to monitor such communications).
But now, with the advent of technology, dialogue is often overlooked. The communication device is equipped with state-of-the-art security technologies, so telecommunications are captured along with a huge treasure trove of information from those devices.
These nations sometimes come up with clever ways to do so. A recent example was the US-Australian joint operation in which criminal gangs were given calls that they thought were very safe but were being monitored by the two intelligence agencies.
But these issues are broader than this type of telephone spying. Even tools for disrupting business networks are now readily available.
In the past, hacking tools - which hackers demanded payment to open access to your system - of criminal networks. They are now easily available at no charge.
One can only accept a plan to give them benefits and they will provide tools and even provide support and advice, as well as support numbers and when it comes to monitoring, not just about states.
It also deals with what companies can do to track us - not necessarily by implanting a spy program, but through a monitoring economy that looks at what we like on social media to sell us to the company.
All of this creates information storage pools that companies can use - but hackers can steal and states can seek to discover.
Some power is now being sold to everyone. Some types of espionage are sold to kidnappers or suspects who want to check where their families are.
The implication of all this is that we may be entering a world in which we can all be spies - but we can all be spies.
