How your phone could be a 'smart' gift to snoop on you

The smartphone that you may have received as a gift from a loved one or a business acquaintance could well be snooping on you with the help of spy apps secretly installed on it. With hidden spy apps, the 'benevolent' giver can monitor each of your calls, text messages, incoming and outgoing emails, and even your location.

Spy apps are easily available on the Internet. While some apps are free, the pro (commercial) ones – which offer more functions like audio recording, device-locking, and sending call logs and location history – come as cheap as Rs5,000 to Rs10,000 a month. Though these apps have been around for quite some time now, their popularity in India has picked up recently.

"Suspicious partners, parents, employers and even politicians are increasingly relying on spy apps to have a "live surveillance," says Sadanand, director of Spy India, a Delhi-based software company. He adds that his company's app gets nearly 100 downloads a month. At least 200 such firms are offering spy apps in India.

Through these apps, one can trace the GPS location and travel route of the monitored phone, sitting over a remote computer. The snooper can also see the chat conversations that the monitored user has through Gtalk or BBM. It starts at every boot of your phone but remains stealth. It silently uploads the information of call or text to a mobile spy account, which can be accessed by the person through login at any computer or smartphone. Some apps like mobile-spy give access to iPad too.

People snooping on their partners say they want to have evidence of "cheating" before taking a final call on the relationship. "I snooped for over a month on my girlfriend as I doubted she was getting closer to my friend," said an MNC employee, who later ended the relationship.

On the other hand, employers insist they aim to improve performance of their marketing and sales persons, who are mostly out on the field. "This is a fair practice. Since we pay them so much, it's well within our prerogative to keep tracking their movement and work. This also helps us know if they are effectively communicating with the buyers or there is a scope for further training," said an official of a water purifier company. The company spends Rs4 lakh annually on tracking 20 personnel.

Interestingly, spy app downloads have gone up since the recent Lok Sabha elections and have been increasing further ever since assembly elections for Maharashtra and Haryana have been announced. "We can't really track the profession of the buyers, but downloads have gone up sharply with the announcement of state elections," says an official of MobiCID, a Thane-based company.

During elections, parties are using these apps to keep a tab on dissidents. "Gifting cellphones to party members in the election season is very common. This helps us keep a tab on dissidents in case they are double crossing us," says a leader of a major political party.

Is it not unethical or violation of privacy to snoop on another person's phone? "There is nothing called privacy these days," says an app maker.

Sachin Waze, a former cop and encounter specialist, who quit the force a few years back and is now a patron of MobiCID, says, "Our app has been designed to use in an authorised manner and purely for the purposes of improvement in performance as well as conduct."