In recent years, applications have multiplied for people who abuse technology in order to track other people without their consent. A worrying panorama
KidGuard is a mobile application that promotes itself as a tool to monitor children. However, it has also promoted its surveillance mechanism for other purposes and has blog posts with titles such as "How to read messages deleted from your lover's phone".
A similar application, mSpy, offers advice to a woman to secretly monitor her husband. There is another, Spyzie, whose ads come out on Google with the results of searches for terms like "discover unfaithful girlfriend iPhone."
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Just as digital tools that collect information from phones to monitor children, friends or lost phones have multiplied in recent years, the same has happened with options for people who abuse technology with the aim of track other people without their consent.
More than two hundred applications and services offer a variety of options to potential bullies, from basic location tracking to the collection of text messages and even secret videotaping, according to a new academic study. A score of services were promoted as surveillance tools to spy on couples, according to researchers and information from The New York Times. Most spy services need access to victims' phones or know their passwords, both requirements are information commonly shared in domestic relations.
In the United States, monitoring couples or spouses through a digital tool can be considered illegal harassment, telephone intervention or computer attack. However, laws and compliance with them have had problems keeping pace with technological changes, although harassment is one of the main warning signs in homicide attempts in cases of domestic violence.
"We misinterpret or minimize this abuse," said Erica Olsen, director of the Safety Net Project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence. "People believe that if there is not an immediate physical approach to the victim, it could not be so dangerous."
In 2013, in a case that took place in Florida, a man named Luis Toledo installed an application called SMS Tracker on his wife's phone because he suspected he had an affair. In January, Toledo was sentenced to three life sentences because he was found guilty of murdering his wife, Yessenia Suárez, and their two children.
Statistics on electronic harassment are difficult to find because victims may not know they are watching them or may not report them. Even if they believe they are being monitored, hidden software can make it difficult to confirm their presence.
However, the leaks of information suffered by two surveillance companies last year - which revealed accounts of more than 100,000 users, according to Motherboard, a site specialized in technology - give an idea of ??the scale. The mSpy monitoring application company told The New York Times that in the first quarter of this year it had sold more than 27,000 subscriptions to users in the United States.
In the United States, there is no federal law against location monitoring, but this type of tracking can violate state laws related to harassment. Spying on communications may violate telephone intervention statutes or computer crimes. In addition, the intentional sale of tools to carry out telephone interventions illegally is a federal crime.
However, it is not illegal to sell or use an application to monitor your children or your phone. And it can be difficult to know if the person being monitored has given their consent, because abusers often force victims to use these applications.
"In short, there are application manufacturers that are accomplices, because they look for these clients and promote that use," said Periwinkle Doerfler, a PhD student at New York University (NYU) and one of the authors of the study on applications. . "They spend relatively unnoticed on that issue, but they continue to do so."
The researchers, from NYU, Cornell University and Cornell Technology, contacted the customer services of nine companies that provide monitoring services. The researchers indicated that they posed as women who wanted to secretly track their husbands. Only one company, TeenSafe, refused to help them.
On YouTube, there are dozens of videos that offer tutorials on how to use various applications that are used to catch unfaithful lovers. Often, the videos link to the sites of the application manufacturers by means of a special code that guarantees a part of the sale to the sponsor, a type of agreement known as "affiliate marketing".
The proliferation of this type of tracking applications raises questions about the role that businesses like Google and Apple have in supervising their services. For a long time, the two companies have handled different strategies to regulate applications.
Apple makes it difficult for iPhone users to download applications outside of the company's App Store and has many restrictions on what applications can do in their store. After testing several programs available in the stores of both platforms, the researchers found that Apple's strict rules limited the surveillance capabilities of those applications more than those of Google software.
In response to the researchers' findings, Google reinforced several policies "to further restrict the promotion and distribution" of surveillance applications, said a company representative.
Google removed many spy and tracking applications and blocked advertising related to the espionage of spouses and romantic partners from the search results. YouTube, owned by Google, downloaded some videos that dealt with spy services, although the company determined that there were others that did not violate their policies because the services could be used with consent.
The victims 'advocates mentioned that they had noticed that the surveillance tools' manufacturers have changed their tactics: sometimes they have moved the servers abroad or have removed from their websites the explicit language about espionage to spouses. "As soon as these companies heard the rumor that they should not do that, they just changed their marketing strategy," Olsen said.
The New York Times
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