When it comes to the cloak and dagger effort of catching philandering lovers, all high-tech weapons appear to be fair game — at least to the tens of thousands of Brazilians who downloaded “Boyfriend Tracker” to their smartphones before the stealthy software was removed from the Google Play app store last week, apparently in response to complaints about privacy abuses and its potential to be used for extortion or even stalking.
“Brazilians are a jealous people, what can I say? Of course it’s going to be popular,” said Marcia Almeida, a 47-year-old woman in Rio whose marriage ended seven years ago in large part because of what she said was her husband’s infidelity.
“It’s a different type of spying,” she said of comparisons to the NSA surveillance program. “You’re checking up on somebody you know intimately, not some stranger.”
The app, called “Rastreador de Namorados” (Portuguese for Boyfriend Tracker), promises to act like a “private detective in your partner’s pocket.”
Functions include sending the person doing the tracking updates on their partner’s location and forwarding duplicates of text message traffic from the targeted phone. There is even a command that allows a user to force the target phone to silently call their own, like a pocket dial, so they can listen in on what the person is saying.
Similar apps are marketed for smartphone users in other countries, including Europe and the U.S., but Boyfriend Tracker is the first that has made any impact in Brazil, a country still irate as it learns more about Washington’s snooping. Brazil has sent a government delegation to meet with U.S. leaders about the spy program that was revealed by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who has been on the run since May and was recently granted asylum in Russia.
Google spokeswoman Gina Johnson said by email that as a policy the company doesn’t comment on why apps are removed.
Critics say even as advertised, apps like Boyfriend Tracker can violate privacy rights, and they warn that in the wrong hands they could be used for more sinister purposes, like stalking. Some in Brazil argue it breaks an anti-online harassment and hacking law in place since April. The law is named after Brazilian actress Carolina Dieckmann, who had nude photos of herself leaked by hackers in 2012 after she refused to pay about $5,000.
However, similar apps popular on Google Play market themselves to parents as a means of monitoring how teenage children use the phone and where they are at any given moment.
[NYDaily]
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