Guest Post: Spying Made Simple: How ‘Stalkerware’ Tools Pose a Growing Online Surveillance Risk
by Kaitlyn Simpson
In July 2018, libertarian magazine Reason published an article by Declan McCullagh entitled, “To Spy on a Cheating Spouse.” The self-proclaimed magazine of “free minds and free markets,” proudly showcased a how-to guide for spying on partners within the confines of the law. In the piece, McCullagh argues in favour of targeting partners through a “kind of aggressive electronic surveillance that once was used only by three-letter federal agencies.”
Popular concerns around digital surveillance and privacy typically revolve around data mining social media companies and creeping government agencies. We should prevent these large institutions from collecting and analyzing our information without consent, so the argument goes. Yet, as McCullagh’s article demonstrates, digital surveillance is quickly moving into the interpersonal realm. As research and personal stories have illustrated, this expansion has inevitable and dire consequences for victims of domestic abuse.
After discovering a growing ‘stalkerware’ industry, I began wondering how digital technologies could facilitate or amplify surveillance opportunities for the purpose of intimate partner violence. Stalkerware is part of an already-existing spyware industry where states, companies, or individuals can monitor a broad range of activities including interactions on social media and actions on a cell phone or laptop. In a recent report by University of Toronto-based research hub, Citizen Lab, researchers defined stalkerware as the following: when the “powerful capabilities” of spyware “are used to facilitate intimate partner violence, abuse, or harassment.”
Stalkware companies like FlexiSPY, Highster Mobile, mSPy, and TeenSafe specifically market their products to individuals for the purposes of spying and stalking on social media and cellphones. As outlined in Global News article, “‘No one is consenting’: How social media is re-traumatizing victims of domestic abuse,” these digital stalking tools exacerbate gender-based violence and have serious impacts on the victims of such surveillance. While not explicitly researching stalkerware, Global News tells the story of a domestic abuse survivor who was re-victimized on social media after a video was repeatedly shared. The video demonstrates the difficulty survivors experience to maintain agency, privacy, and control in the digital public sphere. The public nature of social media also allows perpetrators of domestic abuse to garner more information and influence over their victims.
For victims of cyberstalking, a culture of surveillance can profoundly impact one’s life. For example, in a Motherboard article and podcast episode, “’I See You’: A Domestic Violence Survivor Talks About Being Surveilled by her Ex,” a woman recounts her experience as a victim of digital stalking on social media. “I would reset my phone and in a matter of sometimes days, sometimes weeks I would start to pick up again that it was pretty clear to me that [her former partner] still knew more than he probably should,” the woman said. “The more you try to get help or communicate it with somebody you realize you sound like a complete crazy person.”
Since McCullagh’s article was published in 2018, the stalkerware industry has only expanded with increasingly accessible tools to spy on people’s social media activities, texts, and cell phone calls. However, the future isn’t entirely bleak: with an expanding market also comes a gradually increasing movement to regulate and prevent access to stalkerware. In a large move against the industry in October 2019, the United States Federal Trade Commission announced it would be pursuing a case against stalkerware company, Retina-X Studios LLC. Governments across the globe should follow suit by regulating against the non-consensual and harmful interpersonal surveillance industry and strengthening already-existing privacy legislation.
While the spying of social media and other digital activities by abusive partners is an extreme example of the ills of online surveillance, it nevertheless showcases how important digital privacy is for individual lives – how, for some, it’s a matter of life and death. It is also important to recognize that intimate partner digital surveillance fosters under a pre-existing social environment where marginalized people face systematic inequalities and oppressive frameworks. Moving forward, it is worth considering how the experience of digital surveillance varies for different bodies; how for some people, the stakes of privacy are much higher, and the consequences of compromised privacy are greater.
References
“FTC Brings First Case Against Developers of ‘Stalking’ Apps.” Federal Trade Commission, October 22, 2019.
Patton, Jessica. “‘No one is consenting’: How social media is re-traumatizing victims of domestic abuse.” Global News, November 27, 2019.
Koebler, Jason. “‘I See You’: A Domestic Violence Survivor Talks About Being Surveilled By Her Ex” Motherboard. Vice, March 17, 2017.
McCullagh, Declan. “To Spy on a Cheating Spouse.” Reason.com. Reason, May 31, 2018.
Parsons, Christopher, Adam Molnar, Jakub Dalek, Jeffrey Knockel, Miles Kenyon, Bennett Haselton, Cynthia Khoo, and Ron Deibert. “The Predator in Your Pocket: A Multidisciplinary Assessment of the Stalkerware Application Industry.” Citizen Lab, June 12, 2019.
Featured Image: Caméras de surveillance sur la voie publique by Pierre-alain dorange (CC-BY-SA 3.0)
People said…