Romance in 2021: Using creepware to keep tabs on your partner or ex. Aww Online stalking appears to be as much a part of modern relationships as lovingly sharing a single spoon and dessert in a dimly lit restaurant or arguing over who should put out the bins. That's just one of the conclusions from antivirus merchant Norton's latest look at online trends which found that nearly one in 10 people in …
I think for tracking it only needs something like an Apple Tile hidden in a ex/partner's car.
Stalker ware wise, enough people leave their phones lying around, I have no idea what is involved in the installation of stalker ware but if it is as simple as installing and app.....
I'm guessing most of the 33% is social media tracking, which could be anything from reading anything they post to actively tracking the information of those posts to create more detailed timelines. The article says 10% is the figure for installed software, which is still a lot higher than I would have expected.
"Reading anything they post", assuming that's authorized access, shouldn't be included in the definition. I wonder whether the report authors did so, though I'm not curious enough to bother reading the report itself.
I occasionally see messages posted by a former partner, because she sent me a "friend request" years ago, and I accepted it since I had no reason not to. (I never post on social media myself, but I do occasionally check one or two accounts to see what might be happening with family members and the handful of others I've added.) I'm certainly not "stalking" her in any useful sense of the word.
Similarly, I can't muster much concern about people doing online searches for those they are, or were, in relationships with. If the material is public, then it's public. There's a vast gulf between that and either invasive use of IT (like stalkerware) or physical surveillance (even in public spaces).
Indeed. When people talk about something like "Facebook stalking", what they actually mean is looking at someone's Facebook page slightly more than they might normally do. It's not stalking in any meaningful sense of the word, and is not at all the same thing as installing programs on someone else's property to spy on them. It does seem there is a real problem with stalkerware, and it's not going to help matters if it's conflated with completely different and entirely harmless behaviour.
Are you not being stalked constantly by advertisement companies? They try to find anything about you just to shove a right ad in front of your eyes stealing your time and probably contents of your wallet by making you buy something you didn't even care about a minute before.
Why is that legal?
"In the US, men are three times as likely as women to use spyware to monitor their current partner or an ex."
I've seen stories that a lot of women will check on a possible partner online in case he is dangerous. Just where you draw the line between that and cyberstalking is ... probably multiple different answers depending on who you ask. But a man doing the same thing might well be accused of stalking.
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