20 ms·

Smartphones Are Used To Stalk, Control Domestic Abuse Victims

123 points by zo1 12y ago

kijin 12y ago
> It's About Power, Not Just Privacy Surveillance is never just about privacy. It has always been, still is, and always will be about power. It doesn't matter whether it's Big Bro or your ex-boyfriend who is surveilling you. They have exactly as much power over you as they know about your life. Equality of power is only possible when all parties know roughly the same amount about one another.
- vonklaus 12y ago
  I listened to this on air today. Man was it disheartening. These conpanies make you check a box that says "I won't use this for domestic spying", I think thats it. Above it is noted some mods are required, but a controlling person can easily gain access to the phone. Physical security is a major flaw, especially for someone you trust. You can turn on the microphone, listen in on calls, block people from calling the phone, and even download an manage the stolen ip on a handy dashboard. Pretty appalling.
  - girvo 12y ago
    Physical access to anything pretty much means game over, at least for consumer electronics. Thats one of the prices we pay for convenience and useful features. I wonder if it can be changed?
    - eru 12y ago
      Chromebooks are relatively hard to get control off. Physical access makes it possible, of course, but you still need to do more than just install an app.
- amirmc 12y ago
  This is why the 'nothing to hide' argument irks me so much. It implicitly accepts the asymmetry. If everyone had equal information, then it would be a very different environment.
  - kijin 12y ago
    Yeah, the "nothing to hide" mentality really boils down to "I'm okay with letting other people have all sorts of power over me." The usual assumption is that those other people will not exercise their power in unpleasant ways, even when you are completely at their mercy. It's slave mentality at its finest. The Founding Fathers would have been ashamed.
unspecified 12y ago
mSpy[0] is the software that is featured in this story. For iOS, jailbreaking is required. For Android, some features (Instant messenger tracking and Keylogging) require rooting the phone. Also, Windows phones are not supported yet, so go for one of those if you happen to have a psychotic partner. [0] http://www.mspy.com/compatibility.html http://www.mspy.com/compatibility.html
- VexXtreme 12y ago
  Yet another reason not to jailbreak.
  - britta 12y ago
    Assuming your device is jailbreakable, the problem is that your phone is vulnerable to jailbreaking, whether you've decided to jailbreak it or not. In the relevant scenario (the one described in the article, with "a few minutes alone with the smartphone of the person being stalked" and the passcode), if the victim hasn't already chosen to jailbreak the phone, the stalker can easily jailbreak it and install the spyware.
    - scintill76 12y ago
      Jailbreak, patch the vulns that made it jailbreakable, then re-secure it. Most people vulnerable to this could not do that, though.
      - scintill76 12y ago
        Downvotes?
superuser2 12y ago
I was sitting in a cafe in Ogilive Station in Chicago a few months ago, and one of the guys at an adjacent table was telling a story. His girlfriend left, took the kids, and didn't tell him where they had gone. But, he says triumphantly, "the bitch forgot I work for AT&T." He the describes, with pride, the look on her face as he showed up at her new house. Disgusting.
- Qzmp 12y ago
  Nothing your post gives a reason as to why she left with the children without saying. Might that not be a disgusting thing to do to a father? Assuming there was no violence in the relationship I have no problem with the father using all and any means to find his kids.
  - LaGrange 12y ago
    Actually, the father being the kind of person to use his job to stalk his ex sounds like good enough reason to leave, and save any other sentients from him in the process.
    - thaumasiotes 12y ago
      Let's rephrase this, using only the same information from the original comment: > The father being the kind of person to overreach his authority at work in order to locate his own kidnapped children sounds like good enough reason to leave
      - LaGrange 12y ago
        > The father being the kind of person to overreach his authority at work in order to locate and kidnap children sounds like good enough reason to leave FTFY. Seriously, there are legal mechanisms for such situations, if you seriously think he was not the abuser there. Though I suspect you're just an MRA troll.
        12y ago
throwaway_xl5 12y ago
BetaBoston had a related story looking at technical assistance to victims of domestic abuse. http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes-digital-shelters-turn-to-counter-surveillance-with-tor/ http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes... I think this link has been posted on HN previously but I can't find it. Apologies for not crediting the person who posted it.
- dublinben 12y ago
  This is one of the most powerful examples I like to use when defending the importance of online privacy and anonymity. Victims of domestic abuse have just as much right to use the internet as anyone else, and their lives could be in danger if their privacy/security is compromised.
  - lukasb 12y ago
    I wish this comment was higher up.
- vijayr 12y ago
  From the article : “The question I always asked was how does someone end up in that situation?” her best friend said. “And the answer — from having witnessed it — is, gradually.” Just like every privacy issue, every human rights abuse, abuse of power etc - when things happen gradually, most people don't notice, and when they notice, it is too late.
rickdale 12y ago
This makes me think about every time I call tech support and end up bitching them out. Usually the first thing any customer support does is get all of your personal info like address and stuff. So in essence, by the time they have pissed me off and I have told them they live a worthless existence where toilet paper has more of a use than they do,and that they are friggin idiots, they are sitting there google mapping my house and plotting revenge. Thankfully, phone rage seems to subsist quickly. But I have said some stuff to customer support and then thought twice about how much information that person knows about me when in essence I know nothing about them.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  Have you considered, you know, not treating customer support staff like scum?
  - rickdale 12y ago
    Lol, I wish I could, but I guess when it comes to customer support, having had comcast in the past, I prejudge the situation based on my previous dealings with customer support. My latest customer support story is from Friday. I had purchased $3000 worth of equipment from Best Buy and it was going to take a week to get there. I ordered it on a Saturday and then called the following friday to see what the status was and if I could plan to pick it up the next day, since best buy is 1+hr drive for me, I wanted to plan ahead. Customer support told me that for sure the equipment wouldn't be there by the next day because it hadn't even shipped yet. And additionally they couldn't tell me when it would ship or cancel my order. I didn't inquire about canceling either, this was just what they said. I bitched the lady out because thats not answer you give to a customer that just dropped $3000 + my other purchased which are 1000's as well. . . 15 minutes later I get an email telling me my stuff is shipped. 2 hours later I get an email saying my stuff is at the store. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but maybe I ended up getting my stuff on time because I did. I'll go with the latter. I fucking hate all customer supports, even the good ones.
    - ejk314 12y ago
protonfish 12y ago
It's interesting that spying on a spouse is considered abuse but doing the same thing to children is not. My ex-wife and her boyfriend would do this to my teenage sons - track them with the GPS on their phones, block phone use for most of the day, record and read all messages they sent and received on their computer to a thumb drive. Maybe I'd get it if there was a problem - you caught them with drugs or thought they were sneaking out - but these kids stayed out of trouble and got good grades. I don't know where I'm going with this... Oh yeah. My ex-wife is a nasty, brutish, turd of a person.
- pavel_lishin 12y ago
  > Maybe I'd get it if there was a problem - you caught them with drugs or thought they were sneaking out - but these kids stayed out of trouble and got good grades. The paranoid in me wonders if they had a second set of "clean" phones that they could use to arrange their mischief. The not-yet-a-parent in me hopes that they did, especially since they seemed to be doing fine otherwise.
  - greggarious 12y ago
    More likely they'll be passed out on their dorm floor within 15 minutes of arriving at college. I met a lot of people in undergrad with overbearing parents who partied way too hard - some of whom failed out.
- byEngineer 12y ago
  > My ex-wife is a nasty, brutish, turd of a person. No pun intended: why you married her?
  - protonfish 12y ago
    She had large breasts.
    - psykovsky 12y ago
      So, do you still choose your partners by that kind of physical attributes or have you learnt something?
drvdevd 12y ago
I find the concept of "digital detox" in this situation to be interesting. The Hacker News reader in me wants to say, "But you're missing an opportunity to watch the watcher." I understand most abuse shelters aren't going to be equipped to help teach users how to, for example, monitor and modify the network traffic of background apps on their phone. Or more simply: factory reset the phone before entering the shelter, then turn off mobile networks and GPS and only use the shelter's WiFi. I think it could be an empowering thing for people - to see that they can fight back against their abuser technically in certain circumstances.
- GrinningFool 12y ago
  Shelter wifi isn't safe either, if you forget to disable coarse-grained location services.
throwaway9654 12y ago
As it happens, I've had direct personal experience with the shelter organization named in this article. Several years ago I met a woman, through a friend. We ended up married not too long after. Just over a month into that, she was acting increasingly erratically, creating fights, attacking me, and disappeared one day with no information as to where she'd gone or why. Turns out she'd gone to a shelter, Next Door. She contacted me (via phone and email from there. It turns out there's a provision of immigration law, called an I-360 petition, that's part of the Violence Against Women Act (though both the act and petition apply to all genders) in which an abused spouse of a permanent resident can claim citizenship status. The claims of the alleged victim are taken prima facie (on their face) to be true. It's quite the law. I visited Next Door, by appointment, having been the victim of abuse myself in this case, both for information on where I could turn, and on what they knew about the I-360 process and how I might protect my own interests (another long story). I met with the director, Kathleen Krenek, and one of the senior support staff, I'd have to check my notes, but she doesn't appear to be on the organization's web page presently. They were markedly less than supportive. I made absolutely clear that I wasn't seeking information on my ex. AT&T employees weren't required to spill this information to my ex. Next Door informed her themselves, as noted in court testimony. The outcome of the family law case was annulment of marriage on the basis of fraud. My ex remains in the US, presumably by way of her fraudulent VAWA petition. Apparently the ICE haven't bothered requesting or reading the annulment decision, or the Court's finding of my ex as "less than credible". It's been five years since the last court date and decision, but this still burns pretty deep. I absolutely didn't consider myself MRA before this (anything but), and find a hell of a lot in the movement that's pretty objectionable, but there's an absolute truth that the system frequently presumes a role and guilt on men, termed "the abuser" in the relevant VAWA statute, despite the fact that there's no actual proof involved. One thing I did learn is that the process is ugly, extremely expensive, soul-sucking, and needlessly confrontational in far too many ways. Human relationship are like that, and it's not until you've seen them go south, and encountered the reasons and deceptions revealed, that you really get a full understanding of this.

123 points by zo1 12y ago

kijin 12y ago

> It's About Power, Not Just Privacy Surveillance is never just about privacy. It has always been, still is, and always will be about power. It doesn't matter whether it's Big Bro or your ex-boyfriend who is surveilling you. They have exactly as much power over you as they know about your life. Equality of power is only possible when all parties know roughly the same amount about one another.

vonklaus 12y ago
I listened to this on air today. Man was it disheartening. These conpanies make you check a box that says "I won't use this for domestic spying", I think thats it. Above it is noted some mods are required, but a controlling person can easily gain access to the phone. Physical security is a major flaw, especially for someone you trust. You can turn on the microphone, listen in on calls, block people from calling the phone, and even download an manage the stolen ip on a handy dashboard. Pretty appalling.
- girvo 12y ago
  Physical access to anything pretty much means game over, at least for consumer electronics. Thats one of the prices we pay for convenience and useful features. I wonder if it can be changed?
  - eru 12y ago
    Chromebooks are relatively hard to get control off. Physical access makes it possible, of course, but you still need to do more than just install an app.
amirmc 12y ago
This is why the 'nothing to hide' argument irks me so much. It implicitly accepts the asymmetry. If everyone had equal information, then it would be a very different environment.
- kijin 12y ago
  Yeah, the "nothing to hide" mentality really boils down to "I'm okay with letting other people have all sorts of power over me." The usual assumption is that those other people will not exercise their power in unpleasant ways, even when you are completely at their mercy. It's slave mentality at its finest. The Founding Fathers would have been ashamed.

unspecified 12y ago

mSpy[0] is the software that is featured in this story. For iOS, jailbreaking is required. For Android, some features (Instant messenger tracking and Keylogging) require rooting the phone. Also, Windows phones are not supported yet, so go for one of those if you happen to have a psychotic partner. [0] http://www.mspy.com/compatibility.html http://www.mspy.com/compatibility.html

VexXtreme 12y ago
Yet another reason not to jailbreak.
- britta 12y ago
  Assuming your device is jailbreakable, the problem is that your phone is vulnerable to jailbreaking, whether you've decided to jailbreak it or not. In the relevant scenario (the one described in the article, with "a few minutes alone with the smartphone of the person being stalked" and the passcode), if the victim hasn't already chosen to jailbreak the phone, the stalker can easily jailbreak it and install the spyware.
  - scintill76 12y ago
    Jailbreak, patch the vulns that made it jailbreakable, then re-secure it. Most people vulnerable to this could not do that, though.
    - scintill76 12y ago
      Downvotes?

superuser2 12y ago

I was sitting in a cafe in Ogilive Station in Chicago a few months ago, and one of the guys at an adjacent table was telling a story. His girlfriend left, took the kids, and didn't tell him where they had gone. But, he says triumphantly, "the bitch forgot I work for AT&T." He the describes, with pride, the look on her face as he showed up at her new house. Disgusting.

Qzmp 12y ago
Nothing your post gives a reason as to why she left with the children without saying. Might that not be a disgusting thing to do to a father? Assuming there was no violence in the relationship I have no problem with the father using all and any means to find his kids.
- LaGrange 12y ago
  Actually, the father being the kind of person to use his job to stalk his ex sounds like good enough reason to leave, and save any other sentients from him in the process.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    Let's rephrase this, using only the same information from the original comment: > The father being the kind of person to overreach his authority at work in order to locate his own kidnapped children sounds like good enough reason to leave
    - LaGrange 12y ago
      > The father being the kind of person to overreach his authority at work in order to locate and kidnap children sounds like good enough reason to leave FTFY. Seriously, there are legal mechanisms for such situations, if you seriously think he was not the abuser there. Though I suspect you're just an MRA troll.
      - 12y ago

throwaway_xl5 12y ago

BetaBoston had a related story looking at technical assistance to victims of domestic abuse. http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes-digital-shelters-turn-to-counter-surveillance-with-tor/ http://betaboston.com/news/2014/05/07/as-domestic-abuse-goes... I think this link has been posted on HN previously but I can't find it. Apologies for not crediting the person who posted it.

dublinben 12y ago
This is one of the most powerful examples I like to use when defending the importance of online privacy and anonymity. Victims of domestic abuse have just as much right to use the internet as anyone else, and their lives could be in danger if their privacy/security is compromised.
- lukasb 12y ago
  I wish this comment was higher up.
vijayr 12y ago
From the article : “The question I always asked was how does someone end up in that situation?” her best friend said. “And the answer — from having witnessed it — is, gradually.” Just like every privacy issue, every human rights abuse, abuse of power etc - when things happen gradually, most people don't notice, and when they notice, it is too late.

rickdale 12y ago

This makes me think about every time I call tech support and end up bitching them out. Usually the first thing any customer support does is get all of your personal info like address and stuff. So in essence, by the time they have pissed me off and I have told them they live a worthless existence where toilet paper has more of a use than they do,and that they are friggin idiots, they are sitting there google mapping my house and plotting revenge. Thankfully, phone rage seems to subsist quickly. But I have said some stuff to customer support and then thought twice about how much information that person knows about me when in essence I know nothing about them.

pavel_lishin 12y ago
Have you considered, you know, not treating customer support staff like scum?
- rickdale 12y ago
  Lol, I wish I could, but I guess when it comes to customer support, having had comcast in the past, I prejudge the situation based on my previous dealings with customer support. My latest customer support story is from Friday. I had purchased $3000 worth of equipment from Best Buy and it was going to take a week to get there. I ordered it on a Saturday and then called the following friday to see what the status was and if I could plan to pick it up the next day, since best buy is 1+hr drive for me, I wanted to plan ahead. Customer support told me that for sure the equipment wouldn't be there by the next day because it hadn't even shipped yet. And additionally they couldn't tell me when it would ship or cancel my order. I didn't inquire about canceling either, this was just what they said. I bitched the lady out because thats not answer you give to a customer that just dropped $3000 + my other purchased which are 1000's as well. . . 15 minutes later I get an email telling me my stuff is shipped. 2 hours later I get an email saying my stuff is at the store. Maybe I shouldn't have said anything, but maybe I ended up getting my stuff on time because I did. I'll go with the latter. I fucking hate all customer supports, even the good ones.
  - ejk314 12y ago

protonfish 12y ago

It's interesting that spying on a spouse is considered abuse but doing the same thing to children is not. My ex-wife and her boyfriend would do this to my teenage sons - track them with the GPS on their phones, block phone use for most of the day, record and read all messages they sent and received on their computer to a thumb drive. Maybe I'd get it if there was a problem - you caught them with drugs or thought they were sneaking out - but these kids stayed out of trouble and got good grades. I don't know where I'm going with this... Oh yeah. My ex-wife is a nasty, brutish, turd of a person.

pavel_lishin 12y ago
> Maybe I'd get it if there was a problem - you caught them with drugs or thought they were sneaking out - but these kids stayed out of trouble and got good grades. The paranoid in me wonders if they had a second set of "clean" phones that they could use to arrange their mischief. The not-yet-a-parent in me hopes that they did, especially since they seemed to be doing fine otherwise.
- greggarious 12y ago
  More likely they'll be passed out on their dorm floor within 15 minutes of arriving at college. I met a lot of people in undergrad with overbearing parents who partied way too hard - some of whom failed out.
byEngineer 12y ago
> My ex-wife is a nasty, brutish, turd of a person. No pun intended: why you married her?
- protonfish 12y ago
  She had large breasts.
  - psykovsky 12y ago
    So, do you still choose your partners by that kind of physical attributes or have you learnt something?

drvdevd 12y ago

I find the concept of "digital detox" in this situation to be interesting. The Hacker News reader in me wants to say, "But you're missing an opportunity to watch the watcher." I understand most abuse shelters aren't going to be equipped to help teach users how to, for example, monitor and modify the network traffic of background apps on their phone. Or more simply: factory reset the phone before entering the shelter, then turn off mobile networks and GPS and only use the shelter's WiFi. I think it could be an empowering thing for people - to see that they can fight back against their abuser technically in certain circumstances.

GrinningFool 12y ago
Shelter wifi isn't safe either, if you forget to disable coarse-grained location services.

throwaway9654 12y ago

As it happens, I've had direct personal experience with the shelter organization named in this article. Several years ago I met a woman, through a friend. We ended up married not too long after. Just over a month into that, she was acting increasingly erratically, creating fights, attacking me, and disappeared one day with no information as to where she'd gone or why. Turns out she'd gone to a shelter, Next Door. She contacted me (via phone and email from there. It turns out there's a provision of immigration law, called an I-360 petition, that's part of the Violence Against Women Act (though both the act and petition apply to all genders) in which an abused spouse of a permanent resident can claim citizenship status. The claims of the alleged victim are taken prima facie (on their face) to be true. It's quite the law. I visited Next Door, by appointment, having been the victim of abuse myself in this case, both for information on where I could turn, and on what they knew about the I-360 process and how I might protect my own interests (another long story). I met with the director, Kathleen Krenek, and one of the senior support staff, I'd have to check my notes, but she doesn't appear to be on the organization's web page presently. They were markedly less than supportive. I made absolutely clear that I wasn't seeking information on my ex. AT&T employees weren't required to spill this information to my ex. Next Door informed her themselves, as noted in court testimony. The outcome of the family law case was annulment of marriage on the basis of fraud. My ex remains in the US, presumably by way of her fraudulent VAWA petition. Apparently the ICE haven't bothered requesting or reading the annulment decision, or the Court's finding of my ex as "less than credible". It's been five years since the last court date and decision, but this still burns pretty deep. I absolutely didn't consider myself MRA before this (anything but), and find a hell of a lot in the movement that's pretty objectionable, but there's an absolute truth that the system frequently presumes a role and guilt on men, termed "the abuser" in the relevant VAWA statute, despite the fact that there's no actual proof involved. One thing I did learn is that the process is ugly, extremely expensive, soul-sucking, and needlessly confrontational in far too many ways. Human relationship are like that, and it's not until you've seen them go south, and encountered the reasons and deceptions revealed, that you really get a full understanding of this.