FTC Brings First Case Against Developers of “Stalking” Apps

This kind of stalker app reminds me of remote administration tools. They had another name, I don't remember what it was.

Spyware informs third party that is mostly not relevant about your actions. It is bad, but does not imply loss of freedom or physical danger around.

Stalkerware allows person who knows you personally to, well, stalk you. It implies more immediate threat to both freedom, privacy and physical safety.

My mother, on the other hand...

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.

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.

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 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.'

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?

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.

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.

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.

In my example, the knife is the app.

In your example, the knife is the phone.

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.