mSpy is a new app that treads a dangerous line of illegality with its remote surveillance and tracking service.
In the evolving world of security the industry is always looking for new and improved ways to carry out surveillance, but now a smartphone app has been developed that allows you to spy on every movement, conversation, and interaction its user makes.
The morally dubious mSpy app allows you to remotely monitor Facebook activity, text messages, phone calls, incoming and outgoing emails, and pictures or videos taken by the phone. Perhaps most alarmingly, it even allows you to turn the phone into a bug, recording conversations that are happening within the vicinity of the device. And the app is supposedly “100% invisible and undetectable” to the phone’s user, or “target” as mSpy refers to them.
The app is marketed at concerned parents and business owners who want to legitimately keep tabs on their children and employees’ activities. For a business, the app makes sense, making it easier for an employer to monitor their staffs call logs, or their location when on a business trip, for example.
There is a disclaimer on the website that reads:
My Spy (mSpy) is designed for monitoring your children, employees or others on a smartphone or mobile device that you own or have proper consent to monitor. You are required to notify users of the device that they are being monitored.
But what isn’t clear is why the GB pound 24.99 (US$41) per month app needs to be completely undetectable, if you have first informed them that you have installed the surveillance app. Indeed, mSpy’s own marketing tacitly implies that one would not, realistically, ask permission before installing the app.
In this promo video produced last year, the presenter, “Alan,” states quite clearly:
Unlike its competitors, mSpy is completely invisible to the person you’re monitoring. Owners of the target phone will never have any idea that mSpy has been installed.
Alan then introduces an mSpy “user” called Brad, who one suspects is not actually a business owner, rather a struggling actor. Brad explains how he used the app to listen in to “personal conversations just by having the phone in the same room” as one of his employees. He continues to reveal how he installed the software on his son’s phone, suspecting he was using drugs, through which he was able to read text messages confirming his suspicions. Brad also thought his wife was having an affair, and after she denied it, he installed the software on her phone as well.
Now Brad, as well as being a touch paranoid, gives a firm impression throughout that he never asked permission to install this software, which amounts to a breach of privacy and human rights, and would land him in court in almost any civilized country.
In the UK an individual’s right to privacy is protected by Article 8 of the European Human Rights Act, and additionally, the privacy of a person’s communications and correspondence is protected by the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). Liberty’s guide to your rights in respect to this explains:
It is an offence for any person intentionally, and without lawful authority, to intercept any communication in the course of its transmission through a public telecommunication system and — except in specified circumstances — through a private telecommunication system . This offence is established under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000 (RIPA). So it will be unlawful for a person to intercept, for instance, a telephone call though a landline, a call or text message through a mobile network, an email or message sent though the internet.
The way that mSpy has got around the problem of producing an app that could be potentially used for illegal and immoral surveillance activity is through their disclaimer, which states that anyone who downloads the software will not monitor any adult without their expressed permission. This puts the onus on the person who downloading the service.
But then, that’s what illegal file sharing website The Pirate Bay said, as it didn’t actually host any illegal files, merely the means to download such files, and you’ll struggle to access that website now.
The security industry is responsibly run by professionals. The potential for apps such as mSpy to undermine confidence in legitimate surveillance measures is great. Most worryingly, mSpy claims to have almost a million customers. Maybe the software is already on a phone near you?
What do you think? Would you use mSpy or apps like it or should they be banned?