This study was carried out with 21,000 people surveyed in 21 countries in order to understand the attitude towards privacy and digital harassment in relationships.
30 percent of people have no problem watching their partner without their consent although to do this you have to install spyware on one of your devices to control and track your movements., your photos, your messaging or your social networks.
More than half of the population (60 percent) is unaware, however what are these “spy” programs – which the major tech giants have already removed from their “stores”?-, technically known as stalkerware, and the possibilities that the person who installs it has of knowing a location, internet activity and even recording conversations and video.
The data comes from a study commissioned by the multinational in the cybersecurity sector Kaspersky and several NGOs on the second anniversary of the Coalition against Stalkerware, an initiative to which forty institutions, associations, companies and non-governmental organizations have already joined who work against harassment and sexist violence.
The study has been carried out with 21,000 people surveyed in 21 countries in order to know the attitude towards privacy and digital harassment in couple relationships, and reveals that a vast majority (70 percent) consider such control unacceptable under any circumstances.
And among those who do approve of secretly monitoring their partner, almost two-thirds (64%) would do so if they believe that their partner is being unfaithful, if it is related to their safety (63%) or if they believe that they are involved in criminal activity (50%).
8 percent of those surveyed also recognize that their partner has asked them to install a surveillance application, although that percentage rises to 34 percent in the case of people who have suffered some type of abuse by their partners.
The president of the organization Stop Violence of Gender Digital, Encarna Iglesias, has stated that confronting the couple in such a situation “It will only increase the risk a victim faces” of this type of harassment and violence, for which he has discouraged this confrontation.
In his opinion, it is necessary to work to train, educate and help people who suffer this type of harassment by their partners, and the security forces so that they know how to detect and combat this type of program to avoid these situations.
Easy access to spyware
Spyware, which although they are no longer available in the main “stores” (Google’s or Apple’s) can be found very easily on other platforms, they even allow access to users’ registration keys, notify the harasser if a victim tries to uninstall it from their device and send notifications when the person carrying it on their mobile enters the house.
The study commissioned by this company – a member of the Coalition and the DeStalk project that the European Union has launched to combat cyber violence – reveals the concern of many respondents about the possibility that their partner violates their digital privacy and access your text messages, your social networks or your emails.
Their data indicates that Russia, Brazil and the United States are the countries with the highest number of incidents of this type, and that in Europe that classification is led by Germany, followed by Italy, the United Kingdom, France, Poland and Spain, although the countries where the respondents were most permissive were India, Malaysia and China. (I)
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