Verb
spy on (third-person singular simple present spies on, present participle spying on, simple past and past participle spied on)
To watch secretly or covertly; to surveil.
Living, just by itself - what a dirge that is! Life is a classroom and Boredom's the usher, there all the time to spy on you; whatever happens, you've got to look as if you were awfully busy all the time doing something that's terribly exciting - or he'll come along and nibble your brain.[32]. Louis-Ferdinand Céline
If you live with death threats, you need friends. So you have to risk that they might spy on you. Herta Müller
One does not spy on one's own people,” ZeSpiole informed him. "One has, rather, conduits of communication which lead to the common man. Iain Banks
The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties. Graham Greene
What I'm getting at is, you know, if we really want to get serious about helping all the people living in the street and getting people jobs, we could just hire half the people in the country to spy on the other half. Jello Biafra
I am on Facebook, but mainly as a way to spy on my children. I find out more about them from their Facebook pages than from what they tell me. Salman Rushdie