People need to stop calling it (just) stalkerware and call it what it obviously is: malware. It's no different from any other form of malware. Just the criminals are probably people you know rather than online opportunists.
You seem to think that "malware" sounds worse and somehow more specific than "stalkerware". Stalkerware sounds like a more nefarious subset of malware, and I'm not sure what conflating a more specific term into a less specific one achieves
I might be slightly younger, but under the meaning I remember, almost every website today would qualify as running spyware. Google Analytics is spyware.
This kind of stalker app reminds me of remote administration tools. They had another name, I don't remember what it was.
Different connotations, I think - I don't consider spyware to be targeted, it's more of a "send it to everyone and hope you get some juicy info on someone", whereas stalkerware makes it clear it's for specifically targeting individuals.
Could do. I guess I’d associate that with mass surveillance against many targets who aren’t know to the attacker? Stalkerware felt sufficiently evocative
These days I would hope the GDPR big hammer could be brought to bear on such cases.
(Also, you could make the argument that installing such software on someone else's work laptop constitutes IP theft and/or breach of local computer security laws...)
The FTC order allows them to do so. The problem was the apps are marketed to monitor employees and minors of which the installer is the legal guardian, both which are completely legal. But it was being used in some cases by customers to monitor other adults, which is not legal without consent. The company agreed to get the users to check a box saying it was being used for minors or employees, both which remain legal uses of the apps.
A better system would be to require that it is very clear the user is being monitored. Some kind of persistent notification and popup on every boot notifying the user of the software. This way it still works fine for corporate setups but is useless for stalkers
I think macOS Catalina has taken some steps to implement this type of approach. Users will be notified when an application starts key logging or taking screenshots. I'm not sure how frequently though.
My point is: using these apps to monitor people without legal consent is super not cool, obviously, but there’s an even bigger problem which is parents relying on legal-but-shady stalking apps. Parents and kids need to be able to trust each other. Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop.
> Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop.
surveillance [1]
n. Close observation of person or group, especially one under suspicion.
n. The act of observing or the condition of being observed.
---
This is CERTAINLY your responsibility toward your children. (The lack of it is known as "neglect".)
Personally, I do not let my 6 year old go to the small neighborhood park by himself. But if he has a remote monitoring device, I do.
As he gets older, there will be other cases where he will be allowed to do things only under some type of supervision.
Obviously it varies by age and maturity, where age 0 requires earshot proximity, and age 17.5 requires comparatively minimal attention to diet, education, and recreation.
"No surveillance full stop" is simply wrong.
"No electronic surveillance" is I think unwise and ignores opportunities for safe, constructive experiences.
"No secret surveillance" is I think a fair statement.
There will come an age where your son's concepts of trust and responsibility will undergo a metamorphosis, and ordering them to keep a surveillance device on them might make them develop trust issues, and atypical expectations of privacy in their personal relationships, which may take them their entire young adulthood to work through.
I can't agree with this enough, and I feel like the slope along which you slide as you start treating your offspring as a human and not a ward should be steeper and start earlier in almost all cases.
Usually surveillance is something parents aren't mature enough to handle. It wouldn't be a big problem if the parents were mature enough to step back and say 'is there any actual probability of actual harm here?' Unfortunately, most parents use surveillance to actively do harm. Not intentionally, of course, but parents lack a basic understanding that change and growth in maturity and capability in their children is a GOOD thing. They typically see it as their primary responsibility to prevent their children from changing, to "protect" them against the exact experiences which are completely necessary and required to induce development. Brain development does not occur automatically. It is not a function of growth of new neurons or a function of age. It is purely a function of experience, with novel experiences and intense experiences being the primary drivers. Most parents (certainly not all, luckily) are so focused on blocking things their children aren't "ready for" that they never once stop to ask themselves what they need to do to make their child ready for the thing they're blocking.
I think that is the main sticking point people have with parents surveilling their children when concerns are expressed. Especially when doing things like reviewing all of their childs text messages, web browsing history, etc, the worry is that the parent will likely seek to moderate almost every interaction their child has with another person which is a very scary overstepping of boundaries that has never even been possible before. This rises to a level that concerns everyone in society, really, as they will be interacting with those children as they grow and when they reach a premature adulthood, having been robbed of many formative experiences 'for their own good.'
I think the next generation is going to be so used to surveillance from their parents and schools that they'll hardly bat an eye when corporations or governments impose similar systems.
We're not talking about 6 year olds here. We're talking about "children" that are at times not even minors, whose parents are trying to control every aspect of their lives well beyond any reasonable limit.
As a 12 year old me and my peers had no mobile phones and most of us went home from school alone, using public transportation in Budapest, a city of 2 million.
This was already this century.
Americans seem to have a very strange notion of what children can do at what ages. Kids at age 8 can reasonably go to and from school if it's close enough. This of course relies on living in a walkable area and I guess that's partially where the problem starts in the US. Parents got used to the idea that kids need to be transported by car or a specific, restricted-use school bus, leaving no freedom or agency for the children. Yes, growing up involves making mistakes, doing mischief, testing boundaries, learning what it is like to lie, feeling what a resulting bad conscience feels like, what a secret feels like etc. Yes, it may mean that the kid may skip a class or go somewhere they are not supposed to, but usually these aren't life shaking mistakes, unless there are deeper problems at home and with the parental environment.
What children can do at what age is a direct function of how they are raised. Americans, unfortunately, have been sold on the notion that what a child is capable of is instead somehow a biological limitation. There are some biological limitations, of course, such as the inability for average children before around age 10 to perform abstract reasoning, etc, but they are very few. And those limitations are misunderstood, as well. While the truth is that a child exposed to something 'before they can understand it' will experience confusion (or misunderstanding... 'kid logic' can be amazing in the lengths to which it stretches to attempt to integrate new knowledge), it is assumed they will instead experience intense, damaging trauma. I think there is also a component involved of 'doing something is better than doing nothing' when, in many cases, doing nothing would definitely be the better solution. I don't believe there are hardly any parents who, for instance, could come across a string of 'dead baby' jokes in a group chat their 11 year old is participating in and conclude 'my child is developing a sense of humor and fitting in with a peer group.' They would instead conclude 'my child is uncaring, incapable of empathy, foul-mouthed, and I need to make them understand how serious this is.' A reaction like that, from your parent, would be devastating. They know you better than anyone. If they tell you that you are an uncaring, unkind, vicious person, you are not going to be able to step back and see that your parent is being ridiculous in most cases. You will simply be hurt, and that parent has certainly not prepared you for how to handle emotions like that. It ends up with an immature person (the parent) inflicting distress on another immature person (the child) and no one benefits.
Also, parents overestimate their explicit influence on kids and thereby their importance and responsibility in explicitly teaching them by setting rules and "preaching". Instead, kids brains are very good at filtering out the bullshit, learning by observing actions rather than talk and learning from peers and other adults.
However, a truly dictatorial parental surveillance scheme, as is now possible through tech, may inhibit the information transfer even more. Combined with practices like constant parental transportation, structured extracurriculars every day, no recess at school or homeschooling a very dystopian picture emerges.
I grew up in a home where my parents separated when I was in 1st grade.
Mother who gained custody had sever bipolar which led to days where she literally would not get out of bed.
When I was in 6th grade I remember having to pack lunches for my sister who was 4 years younger and make sure we both went to the bus stop and got to school each day.
It was a bit more difficult when I hit the 7th and 8th grades as the school in the area started those grades an hour earlier than K-6 and my sister and I no longer rode the same bus at the same time.
We managed pretty good, and my sister and I are very close to this day because of how we took care of each other growing up.
I also had immense freedom, no curfew/bedtime and freedom to roam unsupervised unless my grades slipped. I enjoyed the freedom so I managed to keep my grades up my entire education.
It helped that cell phones in the hands of every child were still not a thing, just as I turned 18 and moved out on my own is when I remember getting my first cell phone.
> As a 12 year old me and my peers had no mobile phones and most of us went home from school alone
Again that is cherry-picking.
Yes, I walked to school alone when I was 12. Also when I was 7.
But school is a consistent, well-known location with adult supervision at the destination. The amount of maturity required for traveling to school is minimal.
Kids can do a lot more open-ended activities than walking/taking the bus to school.
Surveilling your kids is not the complete answer, but it is certainly part of the answer.
I think there’s a false assumption that these kinds of apps are used by parents to replace communication and other methods, but it’s part of strong communication between kids and parents.
Lots of people believe there is a certain right way and a certain wrong way to parent. When really what it is is every kid, every parent, and every relationship is different. What works for one may not work for others. The same way as every other relationship on the planet works.
There are some constants that almost always apply. Don't hit, don't steal, don't abandon, try not to yell. But outside of those, I'm convinced that a lot of what you see as parenting advice out there is just survivorship masquerading as wisdom. Some people get really easy kids, and they confusedly believe that they were awesome parents. Some people get really tough kids and have to try strategies parents with easy kids never had to reach for. Even this is an oversimplification, since there are actually many different dimensions to parenting, not a simple easy to hard continuum.
I can absolutely believe there are some parent-child relationships that would not tolerate phone surveillance. There are also parents who would use the capability unwisely. On the other hand, there are children who are not very responsible, and there are plenty of things on the internet and out in the world that can prey on these kids. Only you know your relationship with your kids. "Don't surveil" as a commandment does not fit with the three I mentioned earlier. It's certainly not an absolute.
Another reasonable point downvoted on HN as this comment will be too I'm sure.
Some parents will abuse this ability and there's nothing to government should do about that. Good parenting is hard and some form of tracking is important.
My daughter had a phone from the age of 10, she uses it for google and email at school (it's part of their classes), texting me when her bus is near the bus stop so I can drive to collect her and for texting her friends. She is not allowed to use her phone to install apps that can communicate with people that she does not already know and this is something I periodically check on with the view that I will check less as she gets older. I am actually super impressed that she is not addicted to her phone like you would imagine a young girl would be.
One of her friends does have instagram and other social media, I have checked her pages out and she has many followers that are men and much older than her. I wish her parents would check her phone more often.
Regardless of what some childless anons on the Internet think, it's bloody hard to parent in the age of the iPhone. A simple solution is to not let your kids have anything but I've always believed that giving access to what everyone else has is fine as long as it's controlled with reasonable boundaries put in place.
I'm absolutely not childless. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years.
I'm sorry you feel so defensive and feel such a strong need to justify your choices rather than contemplate the possibility that some people who disagree with you have a fine parenting track record, have been at it longer than you and have thought a great deal about some things.
I wish very much that I had a means to educate more parents. But I am no longer a full-time wife. I have bills to pay and I still support my adult special needs sons and the world has made it abundantly clear that the things I know and wish to share are not worth money.
But in a nutshell, there are hidden costs to the kind of approach you are taking. It is akin to the saying "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
I chose to not tell my children "There are bad people out there that will want to do unspeakable things to you, so you should be afraid, very afraid." because I felt that would rob them of the very innocence I desired to protect and preserve. Instead, I taught them by example what genuine respect looks and feels like by setting the standard for that with how I treated them.
They were taught they could say "No" to people -- including me -- for things like hugs and kisses. They were taught it was their decision, not mine.
But I would happily play enforcer. If someone didn't respect their decision, "Come get mom."
My oldest inferred based on his experiences that protecting himself from a bully with violent force was completely reasonable when he was at school and getting Mom was not an option. He didn't even feel it was noteworthy and I learned that story years later.
Rumaging through your daughter's phone sets a precedent that future boyfriends or husbands can take advantage of to her detriment. And there are better policies that achieve the same thing without that.
My sons have been online since they were two and five. I arranged kid-friendly menus to help them find things of interest to them easily with little risk of exposure to undesirable parts of the internet.
They were not constrained. They didn't want such exposure. They were happy to stick to the things I helped them access that met their needs without having to be hassled with this other stuff.
I know this is a touchy subject and you will probably be offended. But it's touchy because both sides of the argument are personally invested, not because your personal investment somehow trumps mine.
I was molested and raped as a child. I thought long and hard about how to protect my children not just physically, but also emotionally and psychologically. They are old enough that I've gotten to see the fruits of my labor.
Unfortunately, no one wants to know what I did. I'm just a woman, so I must be stupid or something.
We all have our bag of rocks to carry in this crappy world.
Sorry if I upset you. I'm not sure if our opinions are different or not. I think I mostly agree with you to be honest and I don't see where my comment is massively opposed to yours.
I don't believe I am setting a precedent with my girls that it's ok to be spied upon. If you know a better way, I would love to hear more about it.
"Unfortunately, no one wants to know what I did. I'm just a woman, so I must be stupid or something.'
She is not allowed to use her phone to install apps that can communicate with people that she does not already know and this is something I periodically check on with the view that I will check less as she gets older.
Why do you think you need to do this? Why does this need to be a hard constraint dictated and controlled by someone else?
My kids were given some general guidelines from a very early age. I tongue-in-cheek would say "No naked pics and no instructions on how to build bombs." They are my kids, so they understood what I was trying to get at.
They also had it explained to them that as a parent, I had latitude to intercede on their behalf, assuming they stayed within certain boundaries. They understood that crimes like murder or arson would change that fact and put decision making power out of my hands and into the hands of strangers.
My power as a parent served them. It was not weilded in an authoritarian fashion.
If a child is getting their needs adequately met "within the rules," they have no reason to break the rules. When my kids proved consistently incapable of following the rules, I wondered what was wrong with my rules and tried to improve my process.
Is there some reason your child would desire to talk to untrustworthy people she doesn't already know? Is she bored? Is she lonely?
People don't take risks of that sort merely out ignorance. They do so out of desperation. Otherwise, they are quick to go "Nope, I don't need to keep this shitty app for talking to this awful person that I don't even like. Ugh. Moving on."
"If a child is getting their needs adequately met "within the rules," they have no reason to break the rules."
I'm not sure the above quote is true at all. Sometimes your kids want things that you won't give them. You can't keep 100% content kids 100% of the time.
Everything you said sounds reasonable but I think kids can get themselves into bad situations even if they are happy and well adjusted. Sometimes hormones can kick in and make you talk to people that you would never normally talk to.
It's easy to say that kids that are talking to strange adults online have serious issues in other parts of their lives and fixing those issues will fix everything but I think that's a really simplistic way of viewing the world.
I was a very happy and content kid but still got mixed up with things I should not have just because my personality was adventurous and addictive at the time.
I'm not assuming my kids will follow my behaviour but I've seen the overly sexualised content one of her friends posts and all of her friends just thinks shes cool for doing so now she has the popular girl feedback loop. I doubt her parents know. Maybe she's got some other issues and addressing those will fix everything or maybe she hasn't got issues but she's just addicted to it?
Even if she has got other issues, the first sign might be the crap she does on her phone so it's good if her parents see that sooner rather than later.
Maybe you're a great parent but you also had great kids which is only really partially under your control? Not every piece of undesirable behaviour can be easily traced back to an underlying issue that can be fixed. Sometimes it just is.
The reason why I ban her from talking to strangers online is because I don't want her to be groomed while she's emotionally vulnerable. Girls can get hooked on the idea of older boys sometimes, I don't think this means they are unhappy and even if a kid is unhappy in some part of their lives, that's normal and that's ok. Sometimes being unhappy is fine and you need to teach your kids how to deal with that but I'd like to know if she's 'self medicating' by sending naked pics to older boys because more subtle signs of an issue might be hard to detect. It's a busy world with two working parents and large demands placed upon us by her school so it can be easy to miss something.
I did a lot of therapy. I got with the woman in the mirror a whole lot.
I suggest you start a journal, explore your own past experiences and try to figure out what went wrong and why and why you still blame yourself so much all these years later such that you need to project your fears onto your daughter and can't trust her to have better sense than you had.
Kids doing "bad" things are frequently expressing baggage from the subconscious of their parents that the parents aren't even aware they are hanging on their children.
My children were taught from the age of two "It's your body. You can touch it however you want. Just do it in the bathroom or your bedroom with the door shut."
When my youngest hit puberty and became hard to deal with because he was hormonal, I explained that his problem was not called "my bitch mother." It was called testosterone.
I explained that his system was flooded with hormones and this was why he felt so angry. Knowing that explanation caused him to stop looking for someone to blame his anger on.
When he was too ranty, I would say "Ugh, you sound like some hormone soaked teenager." He would say "I am some hormone soaked teenager."
He would try to tone down the ranty bullshit and I would try to have some patience and tolerance for the fact that it wasn't entirely under his control.
The reason why I ban her from talking to strangers online is because I don't want her to be groomed while she's emotionally vulnerable.
What I'm trying to tell you is that you are currently the person doing the kind of grooming that gets girls into bad situations.
I think girls tend to like older boys because boys tend to lag behind girls in social skills. Girls interested in older boys are often just looking for someone who is a good social and emotional match.
I've had relationships with older men who thought they could control me because of the age difference and I've had relationships with older men who were clear they needed to respect me. Men who thought they could control me got quite the shock. I don't react well at all to efforts to control me.
You are teaching her that a man that loves her and wants what is best for her will seek to control her as a normal and caring part of a healthy relationship instead of teaching her "Anyone trying to exert that kind of control is in the wrong and should be told to stuff it."
We probably need to stop here because I have very strong views that sending naked pics to someone via internet is vastly safer than a lot of other activities and our laws and culture should promote such safe practices rather than vilifying them. We should punish people for sharing such pics with others without her permission, but she should be allowed to show anyone her body via photographs if that's what she wants as a safer alternative to showing them her body in person.
I made my peace with my sexuality a long time ago. That isn't always deemed to be an asset by people when such topics come up.
Well now it just feels like you're attacking me. I'm not projecting anything onto my daughter. I don't blame myself for anything?
Maybe you're some expert level parent that most other parents just can't be. Maybe it would take me years to gain the parenting skills that you have but by that time I have already pushed my daughter over the edge?
Your one size fits all approach is sad. Why do you feel the need to fix everything by trying to be some sort of perfect parent? Is this because your parents were not perfect?
It would be a criminal offence for her to send nude pic to other people, it would also be an offence to solicit those pics.
I thought we were aligned on our opinions from your first post but sadly I now just feel that you are very lost and somehow got lucky that your kids turned out ok.
Someone else soliciting nudes from a ten year old is a very different situation from her -- in your words -- 'self medicating' by sending nude photos to boys.
> I suggest you start a journal, explore your own past experiences and try to figure out what went wrong and why and why you still blame yourself so much all these years later such that you need to project your fears onto your daughter and can't trust her to have better sense than you had.
I though maybe your previous post was a one-off but nope, you really are coming across as condescending.
Hopefully by pointing out passages people are likely to find condescending and off-putting you can figure out how to tone that down so it doesn't get people's backs up and drown your message.
I appreciate the good intention, but it's still unsubstantive and needlessly personal. If you get to the point of posting about how condescending someone else is, you've left the path of the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It's also just off topic and uninteresting.
So posts that just point out potential condescension are not welcome here? Do you know if that would also apply if it was part of a larger on-topic post?
It's just irritating to see the condescension and repeated imputing of motives of other commentators go unchallenged. It's rude and disrespectful. Does HN have some other mechanism than peer commentary for dealing with rudeness?
Sure. We spend days and often also evenings asking users here not to be rude. We can't come close to seeing all the comments, though. If there's a post that you feel particularly deserved moderation and we missed it, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it. You can always let us know by flagging the comment (see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#cflag) or by emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
If you're going to react to rudeness and so on by posting replies in the thread, though, it's important to do it in a way that doesn't break the guidelines yourself. Otherwise this place just gets worse.
It would be totally against the spirit of HN, but hypothetically, if you had a Patreon for HN comments, you'd have at least one patron here.
I agree and second 'pcwalton here. I don't always agree with what you write, but I always appreciate seeing it here, you have one of the best insight to comment length ratio.
I actually do have a Patreon account. I have no plans whatsoever to describe it as being about posting on HN, but you wouldn't be the first. I already have a Patreon supporter who made it clear they were kicking in money because of my comments on HN, not because of any of my blog writing per se.
I suppose I should say "Thank you." I'm actually quite uncomfortable with public praise. I have moderating experience and my observation is that trying to be well-mannered and say "Thank you" or otherwise acknowledge such praise tends to cause a rebound reaction where someone feels a need to counter it with some kind of personal attack (something that's already happened here in fact). It also seems to do bad things to the group dynamic.
So I've long had a policy of studiously ignoring public praise as the least worst thing I can do. But that seems to make me standoffish, which causes other problems.
Some things seem to have no actually good answer, especially in public spaces. Anything you post publicly will be interpreted differently by different people. When the group is large enough, that easily turns into a push-pull dynamic as the group tries to sort out which side "wins" the argument.
I thoroughly hate that to the depths of my soul.
My background is participating in online support groups. My belief is that if ten people reply to a question, you should have ten different answers that add information, not one that is "For X" and nine more that vehemently argue about being for or against X. X should have little or nothing to do with the other nine answers.
So my writing style is based on shooting for statements that stand on their own and actively seek to avoid that nonsense. No one has to agree with me. I'm not trying to win an argument. I'm just trying to explain a point of view as clearly as possible and put out a piece of information as best I understand it.
Overall, I'm mostly happy with my writing style, though I continue to try to find ways to improve it. "There's always room at the top." You can always find ways to make it better rather than resting on your laurels and stroking your ego.
Surveilling your kids is not the answer. Full stop.
I generally agree. But the solution here isn't lecturing people on the internet. The solution is helping parents find better parenting methods.
I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I've tried to write about it and one piece I wrote got more than 60k page views.
But it didn't make me any money. And I'm quite open about being dirt poor and wanting to develop an earned income.
On the one hand, I would like to see the world be a better place with better solutions. Poor parenting has larger consequences, including higher incarceration rates down the line.
On the other hand, one of the things wrong with this world is the shitty way women get treated. Part of that is an expectation that they don't deserve an earned income for so-called "soft skills" (oft called emotional labor). They are expected to do caring type things out of the goodness of their heart.
I've literally been helpful to people with big personal problems -- because I'm quite good at that -- while I was homeless and been told, more or less, "Fuck you. My needs matter. Yours don't. Quit panhandling the internet."
So I'm at a point where I kind of feel like "No, fuck you. I don't owe you anything, you asshole."
I stopped giving away so much of my time and expertise for free via the Internet to ungrateful assholes who think I don't deserve anything in return.
I don't know how we make a better world. But I'm quite clear that volunteering to be a victim for the benefit of other people isn't it. All that does is teach them their abusive bullshit is totes fine.
So if you want a solution here, find some way to help parents be better parents that doesn't involve them crapping on someone else in the process.
I don't know how you do that because actual parenting experience fails to have the cache that college degrees have. So I don't know how you find someone with answers that actually work that the world will actually respect as a bona fide expert. College degrees don't necessarily confer genuine expertise in this domain, but it's the kind of thing audiences will pay for.
Probably HN is the wrong venue to get sympathy. Here everyone is constantly giving away extremely valuable information for free. Information that is verifiably valuable as opposed to parental advice that you can't check the value of very easily
People around here (and indeed in most of the internet) are paid for their information in attention and kudos. Your information would need to be almost unique and worth >£1000k for you to be able to sell it for money in todays attention starved market.
> Parents and kids need to be able to trust each other.
Absolutely this. However, there's a caveat. If a minor gets in certain troubles, the parent is held responsible. So, if a parent knows their child has a tendency towards stuff that will get the parent in trouble, I'm a lot less against the parent using tech to keep the child in line.
In my opinion, parents have more of a right to closely monitor and track their minor children than does Google, the US government, the child's school, the company supplying the child's school's tech for free, Facebook, Apple, etc. All those, by strangers, are being done as we speak with little complaint but here we have the parent monitoring their child argued as some massive privacy invasion. Yet if the parent fails to closely monitor the child and something happens to the child the parent is charged with neglect and abuse, CPS gets involved, and the child is whisked away to foster care.
Even if all of those big faceless entities have the ability to monitor my every moment, I simply can't imagine anyone finding time in the day to bother.
... is one of two people biologically programmed to love and protect you at all costs. And again, the ultimate one in your list who actually has a responsibility for you. The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either.
I don't think spying on your kids should be common, but I absolutely know people who have had kids get into some trouble or have good reason to be worried about their safety, and use some "spying" apps to keep an eye on them and help with accountability. I've known helicopter parents, for sure, but I've also known parents who have had close calls with kidnappings, kids who had some brushes with the law and were struggling to keep their distance from the wrong crowd, etc. If a tool fills a need for safety or helps keep honest kids honest, sometimes that's the right tool for the job while they go through the awkward phase of being adolescent: dependent on their parents, the responsibility of their parents, but not mature enough to be 100% on their own and making serious life-affecting decisions.
> ... is one of two people biologically programmed to love and protect you at all costs
Would you say the same for the many parents that are in jail for abusing their children?
> The government and Google don't go to jail for neglecting me, either.
The government is the one who will put your parents to jail if they neglect you. Most of the arguments that I have seen regarding parents being allowed to spy on their children also apply to the government.
Oh you picked two phrases you could disagree with in isolation with reductio ad absurdum? Bravo.
Yes, some people abuse children and go to jail. No, that doesn't mean that no other parent should have the ability to monitor their child. Blanket government surveillance is bad, and I said the same thing about parents spying. But I have no problem with specific cases of specific individuals judged as needing closer monitoring, like ankle monitors for flight risks.
I'm, by all measures and statistics, not a dumbass, and yet still qualify as a child / dependant.
My parents gave up on trying to track / surveil me because I knew more about tech than they, and because it was more or less an open challenge to me to try and break whatever software they installed.
Do you want someone peering over your shoulder and breathing down your neck all the time?
No, because I'm now better equipped to guide my own life than my parents, and it would cause them unnecessary burden. I understand many parents are poorly equipped for this task to start, but that's a different problem.
There are a very few people I really trust and love in my life, and if they had a crystal ball into my soul and history and could read my every thought and action, I wouldn't mind. In fact, if we were smarter and could handle that scale of information I'd even like it. I'm as open with the people I love as possible. Surveillance becomes an issue when it is done by adversaries, such as various large corporations you and many people here might work for, your government at every level, etc.
There's nothing forcing someone to install the app, at least in a stalker situation. Secretly install... maybe, but check your damn phone permissions, people! As with many things, there are good and bad use cases.
For teens, it's a bit more complicated due to family dynamics, but frankly this seems like a parenting issue that has not changed significantly from how things worked before. Instead, it's just changed form slightly because parents can passively track rather than actively pestering their kids about where they were/are/will be. Bad parenting is not a technological creation.
Also, maybe Life360 is just a questionable example, but as far as I know everything there can be toggled in app. Permissions can be denied too. Unless parental controls can stop those options?
These apps were designed to be installed when the phone owner left their phone unguarded, and to be unnoticed by the phone owner. Poor man's Evil Maid attack.
TFA:
"To install the apps, the purchasers were required to bypass mobile device manufacturer restrictions, which the FTC alleges exposed the devices to security vulnerabilities and likely invalidated manufacturer warranties. In addition, while Retina-X claimed in its legal policies that the apps were intended for monitoring employees and children, Retina-X did not take any steps to ensure that its apps were being used for these purposes.
Each of the apps provided purchasers with instructions on how to remove the app’s icon from appearing on the mobile device’s screen so that the device’s user would not know the app was installed on the device, according to the complaint."
Kind of reminds me talking to an old client about pet trackers. He said lots of people think there is a market for tracking dogs and kids. But tracking dogs and kids is just pointless and stupid. The truth is the real market is abusive parents, boyfriends, husbands and pimps.
> Each of the apps provided purchasers with instructions on how to remove the app’s icon from appearing on the mobile device’s screen so that the device’s user would not know the app was installed on the device, according to the complaint.
For the legitimate uses of this app, there should be absolutely no need to remove the app icon from the home screen and there should be a regular/persistent notification of when monitoring is in effect. I can't believe that the company would even think this is a good idea for their intended use, let alone ignoring how it enables malicious behaviour.
>>>The FTC alleges that Retina-X and Johns developed three mobile device apps that allowed purchasers to monitor the mobile devices on which they were installed, without the knowledge or permission of the device’s user.
They are being accused of taking no precautions to make sure their app was being used in a legal way (employees and children), as well as violating child privacy laws and deliquent security practices.
To your other point, selling a legal service that can be used in an illegal way often has legal reprecussions, especially when you ignore compliance w/ applicable laws.
>Retina-X and Johns marketed one of the apps, called MobileSpy, to monitor employees and children. Retina-X promoted two other apps, called PhoneSheriff and TeenShield, to monitor mobile devices used by children. Retina-X sold more than 15,000 subscriptions to all three stalking apps before the company stopped selling them in 2018.
MobileSpy's website [1] is still up but they now have an "apology" for getting hacked from 2018:
>Regrettably Retina-X Studios, which offers cutting edge technology that helps parents and employers gather important information on devices they own, has been the victim of sophisticated and repeated illegal hackings. Over the past year, Retina-X Studios has begun to implement steps designed to enhance our security measures which had the positive outcome of restricting data obtained by the hackers in the most recent intrusion. No personal data was accessed, but some photographic material of TeenShield and PhoneSheriff customers has been exposed.
These apps also appear to be Android only. I don't see how they could run something like this without a jailbreak.
This is small potatoes compared to the number of apps out there periodically harvesting a users' locations to be aggregated and sold to some quant fund.
I don't give a damn that my data is anonymized, aggregated, and sold to some asshole on Wall Street, who uses it to make a stock trade. Even if it's not anonymized well, this is not a physical threat to my safety, because the people buying the data don't care about me. I'm not special. And they don't care about hurting me - they just want to make stock trades.
I mean, I care about this sort of thing - but I care only a little.
I sure as hell care that someone might be using the information on my phone to physically stalk me, in particular. The latter is an active threat to my life and limb.
This is a common argument against privacy measures and a very slippery slope. If it's fine to sell to Wall Street, should it be fine to sell to insurance companies? Who can use that information to label your habits as "high risk" and adjust your premiums as such?
It's much more difficult to take back your privacy than it is to maintain it in the first place.
Is it fine to entrust your child to a schoolteacher for six hours? Is it fine to entrust your child to some rando that walks up to you, and asks to go take your kid out for a bit? It's the same thing, essentially!
Let's not pretend that the threat profile between those two things is remotely similar. Just because it's a gradient, with grey areas in between, doesn't mean that the two situations aren't entirely different. I may not be able to tell you when black turns to gray, and gray turns to white, but I am pretty sure I shouldn't believe anyone who is trying to tell me that black is white.
It takes being incredibly secure in your physical safety to equate "Some investment firm buys my phone's data" and "Someone is physically stalking me."
It's the difference between me knowing that your house exists in a land registry... somewhere - and me physically following you to your home, and waiting outside as you go to sleep. You shouldn't lose much sleep over the former.
Sure, but I think you should compare the incentives between the two situations.
A teacher doesn't have a real incentive to hand off your child to a stranger.
A company holding a large amount of user data has the opportunity to make millions or billions of dollars if they are allowed to sell it as they please. And they would likely do everything in their power to do so if they thought they could get away with it. That is why I think it's such a slippery slope that we should avoid all together.
I've never heard of these apps and it's really alarming and at the same time not surprising at all. I can only imagine how widespread this is... I'm tempted to print out flyers with that NNEDV graphic to put up in public
And some times kill the ex partner sadly in some cases.
Back when I worked for a large telco we had a training film about why you should never look up data on our systems for a "friend" and there was a real case of this happening.
I wonder whether these apps are used by police, cool TV FBI agents and the likes, and whether their ability to fight terrorism, drug and human trafficking, etc would get negatively impacted by limiting of those apps.
> whether their ability to fight terrorism, drug and human trafficking, etc would get negatively impacted by limiting of those apps.
I seriously doubt it. First that I strongly disagree with the war on drugs. Second because, while human trafficking is certainly a problem, I think the scope of the problem is made out to be far larger than it is in actuality; it's often hand-waived for more security, more laws... but what are the actual yearly numbers of people trafficked?
If the FBI gets a warrant to find you using your phone, they don't need to install an app for that. If they want to see what's on the phone then surreptitiously installing an app isn't going to guarantee that either.
Even if these apps are used by the police etc, that's typically only allowed if they make sure to only sell to cops. Of course, that's usually not actually enforced, but services like GPS tracking arbitrary phones or cracking iPhone passcode security are usually limited in this fashion.
These apps are against the law, but you can still implement the built-in location tracking and activity history of the devices? Seems weird to me. They probably forgot to pay the lobbyists in the industry.
Think of it this way, chefs knives are legal. Murder is not. If you work in my restaurant, you can use the chefs knives to make food. You can't use them to kill people. If you do, you will be prosecuted.
The law prosecutes app developers and makes illegal apps that allow for stalking. :: The law prosecutes chef knife mfgs and makes illegal chef knifes that can be used for murder.
This is not you have stated. Your example world does not map to the real world, as it is a paradox to think a "murdering chef knife" can be discriminated from a "cooking chef knife" when the manufacturer creates it.
And that is the point of the parent commenter. A tracking app can be used for both legal tracking and stalking, but it is absurd to think the developer will know which it is.
> it is a paradox to think a "murdering chef knife" can be discriminated from a "cooking chef knife" when the manufacturer creates it.
You can certainly market your knives with an intention. You can study which knives "murder" best, and not study which knives are best for cooking.
I agree that this should be a harder bar to prove, but I don't think it's paradoxical to say it can be done.
> it is absurd to think the developer will know which it is.
True, the developer won't "know" for any given instance. But it is NOT absurd to think the developer will be trying for one or the other, perfecting it for that purpose (with intent), and marketing it for that purpose, nor is it absurd that such an intent could be reasonably proven. (Not ABSOLUTELY proven, but reasonably)
>You can certainly market your knives with an intention. You can study which knives "murder" best, and not study which knives are best for cooking.
But there's also no law against selling knives designed for murdering people in many places. I mean I can walk into a store and walk out with a katana or a long sword or something. You're not supposed to use them for killing people, but that's literally the reason why they were invented. I don't want to say for sure, but I pretty sure the katana manufacturer is still not going to be liable if I go and hack someone up with my katana.
Many US states and other jurisdictions do have laws banning certain types of knives; the laws tend to focus on modern weapons like switchblades, but can extend to katanas. [1]
To the extent they are allowed – and this also goes for their more dangerous cousin, guns – it’s largely because there is a legitimate use case for attacking someone with a lethal weapon: self-defense. No such use case exists for a spying app.
A katana can be (and usually is) used as a display piece. The FCC is saying (not unreasonably) that these apps aren't really suited for anything but illegally stalking people. They claim to be for legitimate tracking, but they made design decisions that clearly disagree with that.
There's not really a direct analogy there (an...invisible katana?), but I think the difference is clear.
What design decisions? If I wanted to track my child with their phone, or track my phone in case it was stolen, what design decisions would differ from those use cases and the stalker use case?
If you just want to locate your phone, or your child's, or your employee's company phone, you can use Apple's or Google's built-in tracking; a third-party app is unnecessary.
If you want to directly monitor a child's or employee's usage, and/or restrict them from some sites/apps/settings, you probably want a parental/employer control app that doesn't compromise the phone to hide itself.
Have you read the article? These apps require you to disable important security measures on the target phone, leaving it vulnerable to attack, in order to hide the app from the user. There's no legitimate use case for that.
> it is a paradox to think a "murdering chef knife" can be discriminated from a "cooking chef knife" when the manufacturer creates it.
If I sell a two-handed sword made with authentic 16th-century metalworking techniques, and I call it a "chef's knife" and talk about how great it is for cutting meat and vegetables and how it should never be used for historical European martial arts, then I'm being dishonest about something.
The problem here is that these manufacturers sell knives which, when configured by a jealous partner, can automatically stab the cook who's using them to chop vegetables.
The manufacturer should make it obvious to the cook that their knife has been modified that way.
It is quite clear in this case that the app developer has developed the app to obfuscate this configuration, and thus shares in the responsibility.
In my example, the sued knife manufacturer is the app developer.
In your example, the sued knife manufacturer would have to be the Mobile Phone creator. You intended for it to be the App Developer.
Regardless, much like the point of a knife is to stab, the point of a tracking app is to surreptitiously track. When a murderer uses a knife to stab a human, the murderer is at fault. When a stalker uses a tracking app to stalk, the stalker is at fault. Not the creator of the knife and not the creator of the tracking app.
I don't understand why people insist on making these analogies when it's quite clear and simple what the issues are / can be with the sorts of apps under discussion here today.
I don't see how this analogy is relevant. They aren't accused of killing people. They are accused of having apps that are used to monitor devices (as they said was for work and kids). Google does this as well as many other apps on the Play Store. Just because someone uses the app by to stalk someone by getting access and installing it on a user's device, won't prevent them from using another feature that already exists to do the same thing.
I called the company, and they refused to remove our data or even help with uninstalling the software without a court order.
The software helpfully logged the URL when it saved screenshots to S3, which it did every few seconds.
The S3 bucket was fully public, listable, readable, writable. It also contained keylogging and other data.
Not just from our employee. From everyone.