Social media and smart-tech have made it easier than ever to pry into the mind of your spouse without them noticing. Nonetheless, privacy and trust are important. Despite this, there is clearly a breach of trust when your spouse has gone to great lengths to acquire your password or reconfigure your email account to automatically copy themselves on every email without your knowledge and yes, that is a legitimate possibility.
It is hard to tell what compels someone to spy. It could be that your spouse suspects you are cheating, or maybe feels you are hiding a bad habit such as gambling or drinking.
Regardless of the motive or what spy gear, if any, is used, spying is illegal and not an advisable approach to exploring any suspicions you may have. This post is not an endorsement of these apps or practices, but a warning for you to know what to look for if you think your spouse could be violating your privacy. In , Apple introduced the ultimate piece of spy gear — a location sharing feature that allows users to share their location with each other indefinitely. It takes less than 10 seconds to activate the feature. You volunteer to grab more from the pantry, leaving your phone charging on the counter.
Your wife picks up your phone, enables location sharing, and puts the phone back before you even return from the pantry. And now she can track your every move without you realizing it. Of course, you can always turn location sharing off again if you want to. To see all the people you are sharing your location with open the Find My Friends app. You can also make changes directly in the Find My Friends app. Phones are where our entire digital lives exist these days. These devices allow us an infinite number of communication platforms, from SMS to email, Facebook, Instagram, the list goes on and on.
There are apps that allow you to send fake text messages, or meet singles in your area. The most high tech spy gear is now available right from the app store, and while there are far too many spying apps to count, we have done the research on the most popular ones for apple and android.
Jailbreaking your phone opens up the potential for spyware as well as other security risks and negative consequences. If your phone is jailbroken but you did not jailbreak it, this could be a clear sign of spyware. There are also companies such as Certo iPhone that offer online support and advanced spyware detection for a small fee.
These companies will help you determine if your phone has been compromised and assist you in fixing the problem. Usually a jailbreak can be reversed by restoring your iPhone through iTunes or iCloud. However, commercial spyware and spy gear is constantly growing and adapting.
After Apple made their software even more impenetrable, the tedious jailbreaking process became less appealing. Now there are several apps on the market that do not require a jailbroken phone at all. Both of these companies allow the app to operate in stealth mode, meaning the app icon will not appear anywhere on your screen. The ability to do this results from the way the mobile network is built, and is commonly called triangulation. One way the operator can do this is to observe the signal strength that different towers observe from a particular subscriber's mobile phone, and then calculate where that phone must be located in order to account for these observations.
The accuracy with which the operator can figure out a subscriber's location varies depending on many factors, including the technology the operator uses and how many cell towers they have in an area. Very often, it is accurate to about the level of a city block, but in some systems it can be more accurate. There is no way to hide from this kind of tracking as long as your mobile phone is powered on and transmitting signals to an operator's network.
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Although normally only the mobile operator itself can perform this kind of tracking, a government could force the operator to turn over location data about a user in real-time or as a matter of historical record. In , a German privacy advocate named Malte Spitz used privacy laws to get his mobile operator to turn over the records that it had about his records; he chose to publish them as an educational resource so that other people could understand how mobile operators can monitor users this way.
You can visit here to see what the operator knew about him. The possibility of government access to this sort of data is not theoretical: it is already being widely used by law enforcement agencies in countries like the United States. Another related kind of government request is called a tower dump; in this case, a government asks a mobile operator for a list of all of the mobile devices that were present in a certain area at a certain time. This could be used to investigate a crime, or to find out who was present at a particular protest.
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Reportedly, the Ukrainian government used a tower dump for this purpose in , to make a list of all of the people whose mobile phones were present at an anti-government protest. Carriers also exchange data with one another about the location from which a device is currently connecting. This data is frequently somewhat less precise than tracking data that aggregates multiple towers' observations, but it can still be used as the basis for services that track an individual device—including commercial services that query these records to find where an individual phone is currently connecting to the mobile network, and make the results available to governmental or private customers.
The Washington Post reported on how readily available this tracking information has become. Unlike the previous tracking methods, this tracking does not involve forcing carriers to turn over user data; instead, this technique uses location data that has been made available on a commercial basis. The IMSI catcher needs to be taken to a particular location in order to find or monitor devices at that location.
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Currently there is no reliable defense against all IMSI catchers. Some apps claim to detect their presence, but this detection is imperfect. On devices that permit it, it could be helpful to disable 2G support so that the device can connect only to 3G and 4G networks and to disable roaming if you don't expect to be traveling outside of your home carrier's service area. These measures can protect against certain kinds of IMSI catchers.
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Modern smartphones have other radio transmitters in addition to the mobile network interface. They usually also have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. These signals are transmitted with less power than a mobile signal and can normally be received only within a short range such as within the same room or the same building , although sometimes using a sophisticated antenna allows these signals to be detected from unexpectedly long distances; in a demonstration, an expert in Venezuela received a Wi-Fi signal at a distance of km or mi, under rural conditions with little radio interference.
Both of these kinds of wireless signals include a unique serial number for the device, called a MAC address, which can be seen by anybody who can receive the signal. The device manufacturer chooses this address at the time the device is created and it cannot be changed using the software that comes with current smartphones. Unfortunately, the MAC address can be observed in wireless signals even if a device is not actively connected to a particular wireless network, or even if it is not actively transmitting data.
Whenever Wi-Fi is turned on on a typical smartphone, the smartphone will transmit occasional signals that include the MAC address and thus let others nearby recognize that that particular device is present. This has been used for commercial tracking applications, for example to let shopkeepers determine statistics about how often particular customers visit and how long they spend in the shop.
As of , smartphone manufacturers have started to recognize that this kind of tracking is problematic, but it may not be fixed in every device for years—if ever. In comparison to GSM monitoring, these forms of tracking are not necessarily as useful for government surveillance. This is because they work best at short distances and require prior knowledge or observation to determine what MAC address is built into a particular person's device.
However, these forms of tracking can be a highly accurate way to tell when a person enters and leaves a building. Turning off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth on a smartphone can prevent this type of tracking, although this can be inconvenient for users who want to use these technologies frequently.
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Wi-Fi network operators can also see the MAC address of every device that joins their network, which means that they can recognize particular devices over time, and tell whether you are the same person who joined the network in the past even if you don't type your name or e-mail address anywhere or sign in to any services. On a few devices, it is physically possible to change the MAC address so that other people can't recognize your Wi-Fi device as easily over time; on these devices, with the right software and configuration, it would be possible to choose a new and different MAC address every day, for example.
On smartphones, this commonly requires special software such as a MAC address-changing app. Currently, this option is not available for the majority of smartphone models.
Apps can ask the phone for this location information and use it to provide services that are based on location, such as maps that show you your position on the map. Some of these apps will then transmit your location over the network to a service provider, which, in turn, provides a way for other people to track you.
The app developers might not have been motivated by the desire to track users, but they might still end up with the ability to do that, and they might end up revealing location information about their users to governments or hackers. Some smartphones will give you some kind of control over whether apps can find out your physical location; a good privacy practice is to try to restrict which apps can see this information, and at a minimum to make sure that your location is only shared with apps that you trust and that have a good reason to know where you are. In each case, location tracking is not only about finding where someone is right now, like in an exciting movie chase scene where agents are pursuing someone through the streets.
It can also be about answering questions about people's historical activities and also about their beliefs, participation in events, and personal relationships. For example, location tracking could be used to try to find out whether certain people are in a romantic relationship, to find out who attended a particular meeting or who was at a particular protest, or to try and identify a journalist's confidential source. A tool called CO-TRAVELER uses this data to find relationships between different people's movements to figure out which people's devices seem to be traveling together, as well as whether one person appears to be following another.
There's a widespread concern that phones can be used to monitor people even when not actively being used to make a call. As a result, people having a sensitive conversation are sometimes told to turn their phones off entirely, or even to remove the batteries from their phones.
The recommendation to remove the battery seems to be focused mainly on the existence of malware that makes the phone appear to turn off upon request finally showing only a blank screen , while really remaining powered on and able to monitor conversations or invisibly place or receive a call. Thus, users could be tricked into thinking they had successfully turned off their phones when they actually hadn't.