A deep dive into stalkerware’s creepy marketing, illegal privacy invasions, and terrible security
Intimate partner violence, abuse, and harassment is routinely linked with efforts to monitor and control a targeted person. As new technologies have seeped into everyday life, aggressors have adopted and repurposed them to terrorize, control, and manipulate their current and former partners. When National Public Radio conducted a survey of 72 domestic violence shelters in the United States, they found that 85% of domestic violence workers assisted victims whose abuser tracked them using GPS. The US-based National Network to End Domestic Violence found that 71% of domestic abusers monitor survivors’ computer activities, while 54% tracked survivors’ cell phones with stalkerware. In Australia, the Domestic Violence Resources Centre Victoria conducted a survey in 2013 that found that 82% of victims reported abuse via smartphones and 74% of practitioners reported tracking via applications as often occurring amongst their client base. In Canada, a national survey of anti-violence support workers from 2012 found that 98% of perpetrators used technology to intimidate or threaten their victims, that 72% of perpetrators had hacked the email and social media accounts of the women and girls that they targeted, and that a further 61% had hacked into computers to monitor online activities and extract information. An additional 31% installed computer monitoring software or hardware on their target’s computer.
The Predator in Your Pocket [Christopher Parsons, Adam Molnar, Jakub Dalek, Jeffrey Knockel, Miles Kenyon, Bennett Haselton, Cynthia Khoo, and Ron Deibert/Citizen Lab]