Spy Tools for the Smartphone to Help Suspicious Romantic Partners

Technologies certainly makes snooping easier. Not long ago, an American company got into trouble and was all over the news for how it placed concealed cameras in all of its toilet stalls to try to check if employees did drugs. Businesses certainly take a close look at every website you visit while you're at a work terminal; that's a given. Now that everyone has a little computer in their pockets that they call a smartphone, jealous romantic partners have it particularly easy finding a way to snoop on one another. Spy tools aren't really today's news. They've been around for a while, far longer than high-tech smartphones, certainly, and people have become used to them - eavesdropping devices and so on. But every once in a while, a new product comes along that takes a situation people know and expect, and that moves it up to a whole new level. That's what the ePhone Tracker, a smartphone app from Retina Software, does.

Of course, the moment you hear of what the ePhone Tracker can do, you're going to be outraged for certain. This app is something you install on a phone that you wish to snoop on. In fact, it wouldn't be far-fetched to call this, actual spyware - spyware installed by a trusted person. The function it performs is pretty straightforward - once the app is installed on the phone of the person (that one is close enough to presumably that one has access to their phone) it keeps track of every phone call and text message on the phone and sends detailed transcriptions through e-mail to anyone the installer chooses. Spy tools like this would be no use of course if the owner of the phone could just take a look at their list of apps and find it. The app however, installs in some kind of stealth mode. The owner of the phone will have no idea that it is there, keeping an eye out for everything they say - to rat on them. The phone's owner may feel quite safe in deleting the phone's entire history; simple track-covering actions of this kind can make no difference to the ePhone Tracker, however. It has a copy of the phone's history all by itself. And oh, as some wife stalkers will undoubtedly be pleased to know, the app records every move the owner of the phone makes - through GPS - and sends that to the snooper as well.

Spy tools such as these could turn a person's phone into a grand peep-hole into their lives. There is practically nothing they do with or without their phone that they can keep a secret from whoever chooses to spy on them. Contact lists, e-mails - everything becomes an open book. Retina software believes that they aren't doing something to empower stalker. They say that statistics tell us that when people believe that they are being cheated on, usually, the facts bear their suspicions out. They just feel that their spy tools are a kind of social service. A social service that costs $50 for a year's subscription. The product apparently has robust user interest. It doesn't speak well for society that it does, does it?