An alarming number of mobile applications enable domestic abusers to secretly monitor their partners, often with little difficulty in installation and detection. These tools are widely available online, promoted through obscure advertising, blogs, and tutorial videos that often explain how to exploit them for illegal and abusive purposes. This pervasive presence makes it exceedingly challenging for victims to identify and protect themselves from digital surveillance.
The range of apps includes not only traditional spyware designed specifically for malicious monitoring but also software marketed for seemingly harmless functions, such as locating lost phones or tracking children. Because of this dual purpose, existing anti-spyware tools frequently fall short in helping victims detect or remove invasive apps, leaving them vulnerable to ongoing abuse.
Some applications are explicitly targeted at abusive partners. For instance, promotional pages titled “Mobile Spy App for Personal Catch Cheating Spouses” feature images depicting aggressive scenarios, such as a man gripping a woman’s arm with visible scratches. These ads clearly aim at facilitating controlling or violent behaviors.
Even apps that claim to serve legitimate purposes, like employee monitoring or child safety, can be exploited for abusive tracking. They often use search engine keywords such as “track my girlfriend” or “how to catch a cheating spouse with his cell phone,” which attract abusers seeking covert surveillance options. This duality blurs the lines between lawful and illicit use, complicating efforts to regulate or restrict such software.
Rahul Chatterjee, a doctoral student in computer science at Cornell Tech and the lead author of the study, emphasizes the severity of this issue: “Thousands of these apps are available in the open market. You can easily find them, and existing anti-spyware apps don’t detect them, so victims of intimate partner violence often remain unaware they are being monitored.” This unchecked proliferation underscores the urgent need for better detection and prevention strategies.
In response to these findings, researchers alerted Google, which subsequently implemented measures to ban advertisements related to abuse and strengthened its policies within the Play Store. The study, titled “The Spyware Used in Intimate Partner Violence,” was conducted as part of efforts by the New York City Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence. A collaborative team from Cornell Tech, Cornell’s Department of Computing and Information Science, and New York University presented their research at the 39th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy on May 21.
Intimate partner violence affects approximately one-third of women and one-sixth of men in the United States. Victims increasingly report online surveillance, which enables abusers to monitor locations, conversations, and online activity—sometimes culminating in violent or fatal confrontations. Often, victims remain unaware of the tracking until they notice suspicious activity or encounters that seem inconsistent with their usual routines.
Abusers often have easy access to their partners’ phones or passwords, making it simple to install invasive apps. The researchers discovered blogs, videos, and chat forums offering step-by-step instructions on how to install such spyware, often beginning with search terms like “track my wife” or “read SMS from another phone.” These resources provide a blueprint for abusers to carry out covert surveillance with minimal technical knowledge.
While Google and Apple restrict overt spyware from their app stores, some monitoring apps are sold through third-party platforms or disguised as legitimate applications. Many of these apps market themselves as benign tools for personal or professional use but are also marketed covertly to abusers. Blogs hosted on the apps’ own domains frequently discuss how effective these tools are for spying on intimate partners.
To gauge corporate attitudes toward these abusive practices, the researchers contacted customer support at eleven of the apps they examined. They asked whether these apps could be used to track a partner without their knowledge. Of the nine responses received, all but one indicated that the app would likely go unnoticed by the target, revealing a concerning disregard for misuse potential.
The study’s authors include experts from Cornell, NYU, the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, and Hunter College. They advocate for a comprehensive approach to combat this problem, including increased vigilance from internet companies to enforce existing rules, development of new system notifications alerting users when their phones are being monitored, enhanced enforcement by agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, and improved anti-spying technologies. For example, learning how to find and remove covert monitoring software can be facilitated by resources like seamlessly moving installed games between steam library folders or mastering mobile game recording to capture your best moments on Android.
While efforts are underway to develop better spyware detection tools, the scope of the problem requires a multidisciplinary response involving social sciences, law enforcement, and technology. Chatterjee emphasizes, “It’s not only technology that can solve this problem. We need people from social sciences; we need people from law. We want to reach out to many more to raise awareness about this critical issue.”
The researchers underscore the importance of ongoing vigilance and policy reform, supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and contributions from major technology companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Comcast. Addressing digital abuse is a vital step toward safeguarding victims and preventing further violence fueled by covert surveillance.
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