But this technology becomes stalkerware when it’s stealthily installed on a partner’s phone to spy on him or her without consent. There are legitimate uses for surveillance apps, like parental control software that monitors children online to protect them from predators. Stalkerware is a thorny issue because it lives in a gray area. “It’s extremely invasive, it’s a very big deal and it’s linked to some of the worst abuse I’ve seen in intimate partner abuse,” Eva Galperin, a cybersecurity director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the digital rights organization, said of the apps. This month, the Federal Trade Commission said it had barred one app maker, Support King, from offering SpyFone, a piece of stalkerware that gains access to a victim’s location, photos and messages. And they have become such a tool for digital domestic abuse that Apple and Google have started in the last year acknowledging that the apps are an issue.įrom last September to May, the number of devices infected with stalkerware jumped 63 percent, according to a study by the security firm NortonLifeLock. They are widely available on Google’s Play Store and to a lesser degree on Apple’s App Store, often with innocuous names like MobileTool, Agent and Cerberus. In my tests, the app documented all of my typing, including web searches, text messages and emails.įlash Keylogger is part of a rapidly expanding group of apps known as “stalkerware.” While these apps numbered in the hundreds a few years ago, they have since grown into the thousands. Once it was installed from Google’s official app store, its icon could be changed to that of a calculator or calendar app. The app described itself as a tool to monitor the online activities of family members by logging what they type. That’s what I concluded after downloading the free app Flash Keylogger onto an Android smartphone this week. But it was actually spyware recording my every keystroke - the type of data that would give a stalker unfettered access to my private life.
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