Spy Buzz: What to Expect From Ordinary Citizens?
It seems like spying will never go out of fashion with government agencies, and instead of the Cold War we now have Phone war, as we saw in the recent Obama-Merkel spying scandal. With whistleblowers like Julian Assange and Edward Snowden we are discovering that although law enforcement agencies are officially against spying on other people, they use it on a regular basis. If even the highest officials are untouchable then what could we expect when it comes to ordinary people?
The latest news stories involving secret government programs, for gathering personal information and spying on internet activities and phone calls, have raised the question about how much privacy can we actually have in today’s world. NSA’s secret surveillance programs are invading the lives of Americans, obtaining information about their communication with people from other countries and even getting access to entire e-mails content from around the world.
American law enforcement agencies are not alone in these surveillance programs. British agencies are into spying too, as their secret program Tempora recently showed. British intelligence used their assets to tap into all fiber optic cables under British territory, and in cooperation with US intelligence, obtained data from Google and Yahoo for millions of users. Some countries like Mexico and Brazil have officially complained against this and took measures to protect their citizens.
This raises the question, what if ordinary people can use modern technology to spy on suspicious person. Well, with mobile phone spying software this is no longer science fiction, as you can easily find affordable monitoring apps online. Despite being rather controversial, this software can be used for something good, like making sure your kids are safe when you’re not around, or avoid the data leaks in your company by monitoring employees or prove that your partner is cheating.
Mobile phones monitoring apps like mSpy let you have complete access to a target phone and are very easy to install and set up. You can have them running in just a few minutes, and store all the data you need on a secure web server. You can have access to call logs, with details like associated numbers, time and duration of calls. In addition, you can record all calls and store them online. Spy apps will give you access to all sent and received text messages, and since they are stored in real time, you can access them even after they get deleted from the phone.
With mobile phone monitoring software you can monitor all internet activities on the phone, including visited websites and downloaded media. Also, you can read messages from all popular internet messengers and access all social profiles connected with a targeted phone. Another basic feature spy apps offer is instant phone location via GPS, and detailed reports on visited places in a chosen period of time.
So, what about regulations and restrictions? Is it really possible that any cell phone can be reached and no privacy remains in today’s world? Companies that offer such tools state that monitoring app is allowed on the mobile devices you own; otherwise, its use is illegal. Also, user should follow state and federal laws as in some states any monitoring of mobile devices is prohibited.
Linda Waters, marketing manager at mobile monitoring company – more information here https://twitter.com/mSpycom. She has 3+ experience in cell phone tracking and data security research. Linda writes for tech blogs actively and covers topics about mobile spying, data protection and other mobile controversial technologies.