A young single mother looked up and felt her privacy evaporate when she noticed a tiny camera in the bathroom ceiling of the basement apartment she lived in with her toddler.

She said it looked like a screw, no bigger than a pinky nail.

“But I had a feeling it wasn’t a screw. I was shaking, I was in sheer, utter panic,” she said in an interview from her mother’s home in Digby County, N.S.

The woman, who CBC News cannot name because her identity and the identity of her son are protected by a court-ordered publication ban, said finding the camera turned her world upside down.