Stalkerware apps PhoneSpector and Highster appear shut down
Reading Time: 2 minutesThe makers of two phone surveillance services appear to have shuttered after the owner agreed to settle state accusations of illegally promoting spyware that his companies developed.
PhoneSpector and Highster were consumer-grade phone monitoring apps that facilitated the covert surveillance of a person’s smartphone. Commonly dubbed stalkerware (or spouseware), these apps are typically planted on a person’s phone, often by a spouse or domestic partner and usually with knowledge of the device passcode. These apps are designed to stay hidden from home screens, making them difficult to find and remove, all the while continuously uploading the phone’s messages, photos and real-time location data to a dashboard viewable by the abuser.
In February 2023, Patrick Hinchy, whose consortium of New York and Florida-based tech companies developed PhoneSpector and Highster, agreed to pay $410,000 in penalties to settle accusations that Hinchy’s companies advertised and ‘aggressively promoted’ spyware that allowed the secret phone surveillance of individuals living in New York state.
New York Attorney General Letitia James said at the time that Hinchy’s companies used blog posts that explicitly encouraged prospective customers to use the spyware to monitor their spouses’ devices without their knowledge. As part of the deal, Hinchy’s companies agreed to modify the apps to alert device owners that their phones had been monitored.
Since the settlement, both PhoneSpector and Highster have dropped offline.
PhoneSpector’s website stopped loading in the weeks after the settlement. Its domain now redirects to an Indonesian lottery website. Highster’s website stopped loading several months later.
The domains, servers and back-end infrastructure known to be used by PhoneSpector and Highster are also no longer online.
PhoneSpector and Highster are the latest stalkerware apps to have fallen offline in recent years following regulatory action.
In 2019, the Federal Trade Commission brought charges against phone monitoring app maker Retina-X, accusing the company of failing to ensure its app was used for legitimate consensual purposes, and failing to adequately secure the sensitive phone data it siphoned from the phones of unknowing device owners after experiencing several data breaches. Retina-X eventually shut down.
Reference: https://techcrunch.com/2024/02/02/phonespector-highster-stalkerware-shut-down/
Ref: techcrunch
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