>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.
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.