We were recently contacted by Patrick Cain, who is an online journalist. He works at the Investigative Desk at globalnews.ca.
Patrick contacted us regarding an FTC article regarding stalking apps, and we were happy to let him have our comments. Our position has always been that FlexiSPY should be used within the bounds of the law, whatever that may be for the customer. We would like to share with you our reply, and would encourage any of our customers to leave a genuine comment explaining your point of view on this subject. Here is a link to his article
Here is our entire reply:
Thank you for your email. Before we go further, I think the following comment on the FTC link you sent, is extremely profound, particularly for journalists who feel they are serving the public’s interest.
“I’m not concerned with being stalked by an ex, rather I’m concerned with being “stalked” by the US government. What is the FTC doing to get the NSA, FBI, and etc to stop spying on the American people?”
Now to your questions.
The quotes from our website that you mention are out of date, and we have removed them.
Please understand, the site is a decade old with hundreds of pages, many of them written in a time where this was not such a sensitive issue. Many things fall between the cracks. This was one of them. Thank you for bringing this to our attention, and we will update all the pages where these errors are still in place.
You are rightly concerned about the visibility of the application, so your readers should note that we have always had the option to be 100% visible to the end user, and this setting can be changed at any time. We have updated our text to make clear that the customer has this option where local laws require this.
The reason for the visibility option is that for many Parents, Employers and Law Enforcement use cases, its entirely legitimate to have the application behave like any other background application such as photo uploads, download of news feeds and so on.
For example, if your 13 year old child is knowingly engaging in dangerous behaviour, or your employee is stealing files, how will you ever protect them or your business if they find a way around the monitoring?
You ask why we do not allow anti-virus products to detect us.
The answer is obvious. We are not a virus, nor a trojan, nor malware, therefore we do not believe that we have to justify our place on device any more than a backup program that is purchased and installed by the user of the device.
The final question on statistics is commercially confidential, but we can indicate that parents and employers make up the majority of our users.
Finally, we fully support the mission of the FTC, which is to prevent fraudulent, deceptive and unfair business practices in the marketplace and by this measure, we can assure you that our products have no interest for the FTC.
Regards,
Team FlexiSPY