A year after it was banned by the Federal Trade Commission, a notorious phone surveillance company is back in all but name, a TechCrunch investigation has found.
A groundbreaking FTC order in 2021 banned the stalkerware app SpyFone, its parent company Support King, and its chief executive Scott Zuckerman from the surveillance industry. The order, unanimously approved by the regulator’s five sitting commissioners, also demanded that Support King delete the phone data it illegally collected and notify victims that its app was secretly installed on their device.
Stalkerware, or spouseware, are apps that are surreptitiously planted by someone with physical access to a person’s phone, often under the guise of family tracking or child monitoring, except that these apps are designed to stay hidden from home screens, all the while silently uploading the contents of a pers...
