Stalkerware is no joke. It's more ubiquitous than people realize and it can effectively ruin someone's life. Even when these tools are used for their intended purpose, I personally find their abilities borderline creepy when employed against kids beyond a certain age.
It's not just trafficking victims either. Abusive partners with a modicum of technical skills can make their victims' life hell through these apps. There are organizations and sites out there (https://stopstalkerware.org/) but they can't always help you if you're completely powerless.
Stalkers and rapists don't need these tools to ply their 'trade', they're fine with existing resources. New resources such as the app in question do not magically turn normal people into stalkers and rapists.
I'm not an expert, but I don't think this is how
stalking works in practice. People don't stalk random
strangers they meet in the supermarket. They stalk
former partners, and (more rarely) people they've
developed an obsession about.
Well, yeah -- I agree 100% that this is existing predator behavior, and most crimes will continue to be committed by a person known to the victim.
However, if not properly safeguarded, this sort of tech clearly can enable some new types of bad behavior.
Ultimately I'm a technology optimist and we shouldn't reject new tech simply because it might be misused. However it's also true that even the most cursory glance at history shows us that just about any new technology is also used for nefarious purposes.
Unfortunately this article is not an exaggeration.
We deal with stalkers on a regular basis, cam sites and stalking seem to go hand-in-hand. If you're ever in the position of being stalked please do the following:
- never ever respond to the stalker
- save each and every message
- pre-emptively alert everybody in your surroundings that they might contact, explain everything and make sure they also never respond, and ask them to alert you if they are contacted.
- formally alert law enforcement
- forward each and every message received, posting made and so on to law enforcement
(yes, that can be a nuisance, and yes it can be embarrassing but if you want them to sooner or later take action they have to be aware of how bad it really is).
Over the years this has dealt with the large majority of cases. The few that are not amendable (for instance, because you don't know who the stalker is!) are far more serious and will need a lot more work to resolve.
The most important thing to remember is that stalkers feed on your attention and your pain, the more feedback they get from you and your environment the longer it will go on.
If this happens to you (it has happened to me...) then I wish you much good luck and I hope that it will end sooner rather than later.
One tactic that we have deployed that is quite effective is to counter stalk the stalkers and to expose them publicly.
Stalkers are usually not first time offenders and likely will stalk again in the future. It helps to have them easily googlable.
What's a bit silly (actually idiotic) is your second sentence. No one is claiming that stalking or rape is impossible without these apps, they are saying such apps makes life easier for stalkers and rapists.
>85 percent of the shelters we surveyed say they're working directly with victims whose abusers tracked them using GPS. Seventy-five percent say they're working with victims whose abusers eavesdropped on their conversation remotely — using hidden mobile apps. And nearly half the shelters we surveyed have a policy against using Facebook on premises, because they are concerned a stalker can pinpoint location.
I believe there's plenty of apps which will give you most of that, but generally they are termed "stalkerware", and the app stores will remove them based on their utility to abusive domestic partners and the like.
It can be automated and packaged into a solution for anyone to use. IRL stalking is hard and dangerous, and it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future. Is that "qualitatively" worse enough?
Why would a child sign up for an E2E app where it’s easier for paedophiles to anonymously groom them? Sophisticated organised criminals don’t use Facebook Messenger, but this article isn’t about them.
From the article and multiple police investigations it sounds like your software is used by them to run their illicit businesses. Having users register could be one option. If there's one guy and a bunch of teenage girls on a plan that might be a red flag or worth further review. Perhaps your company could look at all the people that were busted and see if there's commonalities with how they use the app. It's my guess that if multiple people were using it for trafficking and were busted there's probably traffickers using your software right now.
"Stalker", to me, implies a certain degree of obsession with a particular person. This app is much less discriminating than that- maybe a good tool for a conman, though.
I feel really sorry that this happened but I am absolutely scared for the future because the next stop is babysitting apps that doesn't give a damn about users
Not about stalker, but related question. What if the offender don't really care if you can see them? They just do a suicidal attack to the victim, like what a terrorist always do. Or what if the offender are prepared for the jail time?
You can't stop people who ignore consequences, and this tech enable them to perform what they want without an organized crime group or terrorist group.
State surveillance is an issue, but this tech creates different issues.
We could debate where they are but surely there are limits? I wouldn't want everyone to have access to things like Pegasus (https://citizenlab.ca/2022/10/new-pegasus-spyware-abuses-ide...). You could argue Pegasus could be used to hack a phone of a child predator to save a life, just as you could argue this tool could be used to educate. Maybe for you this username tool falls outside of yours, but it looks more like a switchblade than a butter knife to me.
It's not just trafficking victims either. Abusive partners with a modicum of technical skills can make their victims' life hell through these apps. There are organizations and sites out there (https://stopstalkerware.org/) but they can't always help you if you're completely powerless.
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