FTC orders company to quit surveillance app business – KIRO 7 News Seattle

BOSTON – (AP) – The Federal Trade Commission has for the first time banned a company that makes so-called stalkerware – software that secretly tracks the activity and location of a cell phone user – from continuing to do business in surveillance apps.

Wednesday’s promotion is for SpyFone’s marketer, Support King LLC, based in Puerto Rico, and its CEO Scott Zuckerman. Such commercial surveillance products are secretly gaining unhindered access to someone’s smartphone, causing serious harm, the FTC said in a statement on its website.

Support King marketed SpyFone as a tool for monitoring the activities of children and employees. However, it has neglected to prevent stalkers and domestic molesters from using it for surveillance, the FTC said.

With the company’s products, the installer can monitor a person’s online activities, including text and video chats, and in a premium version even secretly activate the device’s microphone to record phone and video calls.

The FTC found that not only is SpyFone sneaky – no icon will appear on a phone after installation – but the developers have neglected to protect the data collected from unsuspecting victims from hackers. In a hacker attack on the company’s server, information from around 2,200 people was compromised.

There was no immediate response to a comment request email sent to the only contact address on the SpyFone website.

“Federal agencies have long been lax when it comes to letting companies peddle surveillance products with impunity,” FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra said in a statement.

Online guard dogs led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Toronto Citizen Lab have long complained about rampant abuse of stalkerware, particularly among victims of domestic violence.

“In practical terms, this is a bold move by the FTC, but now they have to implement it and enforce it,” said Eva Galperin, Cybersecurity Director at EFF, via email. “It could be the beginning of the end for stalkerware, but even if that’s true, it’s a long process and a lot can go wrong by then.”

Chopra said civil action by the FTC was not enough to “make sense of the underworld of stalking apps”. He called for the application of criminal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, to combat its application.

As part of the proposed settlement, SpyFone sellers will have to delete all information collected by their stalkerware apps and warn those affected by the products, the FTC said.

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