Eva Galperin : What you need to know about stalkerware

Eva Galperin·TEDWomen 2019
What you need to know about Stalkerware
Summary
Stalkerware is monitoring software or spyware that is used for stalking. The term seemed to coined when people started to widely use commercial spyware to spy on their spouses or intimate partners.

And then, if you have Stalkerware on your computer or on your phone, it can be really difficult to know whether or not it’s there. It’s because antivirus companies often don’t recognize Stalkerware as malicious. (The reason is that for GOVERNMENTS, getting full access to your device is really tempting. There seem to be hackers on either side.)

The speaker is a cybersecurity expert. The goal of her and her team is to educate people about those problems and to convince the antivirus companies to change the norm in how they act around this very scary software. The most important thing is not to escalate to violence when it removes. Some companies start to find 2,500 problems that couldn’t be classified as Stalkerware. It must be considered normal to detect Stalkerware by only downloading any antivirus.

Words in this story
call on / pay a visit to (someone)
ma·li·cious /məˈliSHəs/adj/ characterized by malice; intending or intended to do harm