It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Stalkerware ft. maia arson crimew

Episode Date: December 26, 2024

Robert and Mia talk with famed No Fly List hacker maia arson crimew about the shady industry of stalkerware, spy software that allows people to spy on their victims' devices. Original Air Date: 3.20.24See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everyone, it's John also known as Dr. John Paul and I'm Jordan or Joe Ho and we are the Black Fat Film Podcast, a podcast where all the intersections of identity are celebrated. This year we have had some of our favorite people on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angelica Ross, and more. Make sure you listen to the Black Fat Fam podcast on the iHeart Radio app. Have a podcast or whatever you get your podcast, girl. Ooh, I know that's right. ["Wonderful Music"] Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons?

Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions,

sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey, I'm Gianna Prententi. And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. If you're early in your career, you probably have a lot of money questions. So we're talking to finance expert Vivian Tu, aka Your Rich BFF, to break it down.

Looking at the numbers is one of the most honest reflections of what your financial picture actually is. The numbers won't lie to you. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's hard to read the news these days without asking yourself, how did we get here? Fiasco is a history podcast for the co-creators of Slow Burn. In our first season, Bush v. Gore,

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. I'm a psychology professor at Yale. And I started to notice that a lot of my students weren't all that happy. So I created a new class. Welcome, everybody, to psychology and the good life. It became the biggest class in the history of Yale.

I'm a little bit surprised to see as many of you are here as are here, but that's great. But it's not just my students who need to understand the science of well-being. And that's why we launched the Happiness Lab, so you can learn about it too. Are you ready to feel happier? Head to the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or if you like to listen. Brought to you by the 2024 Subaru Share the Love event, now through January 2nd. 2024 Subaru Share the Love event, now through January 2nd. Causome Media. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, the podcast that's happening here in your ear. And one of the things that we love talking about here is a critical ingredient towards

creeping authoritarianism, towards growing corporate control and surveillance over all of our lives, which is of course, technology that makes it even easier to monitor you than it already is. And we're not talking primarily about like, the government monitoring you, because they can do stuff like just pull your phone data from which cell towers it's pinged.

We're talking about the kind of stuff that allows basically whoever can get an app on your phone, uh, to track and stalk you. And, uh, yeah, I'm going to first introduce Mia Wong Mia. Welcome to the show that you also host. Yes. So what are we, what are we talking about today and who are we talking with? Yeah. So we are talking about stalkerware, which is the sort of broad name for the category of software

that Robert's been talking about. And we are talking about someone who hacks one. Well, a stalker where stalker. Yeah, the first one of the stalkerware companies. My arson crime, you the famed hacker of the no flight list yet returning guests. Always happy to have you on. Yeah, always happy to be on. Yeah, so I think I think.

I don't know, I think there's there's a real tendency among and I see this among leftists a lot for kind of good reasons, a kind of not good reasons to really only focus on state and like large corporate actors in terms of surveillance. And that's a mistake. Yeah, totally. Yeah. And so I guess I guess the place where I want to start before we get into the specific company that you do,

is it still called owned? I can't. I it's fine to call it owned or pawned or whatever. I still do that. Sometimes people get confused. But yeah. Yeah. But before we get into that, I want to I want to ask you a bit because you've done a lot of sort of.

I guess you call it research, both actual research wise and then in terms of poking around their servers. Research and churn the list and whatever you want to call it. Yeah. Yeah. So I wanted to just start off by asking if you can give sort of like a brief summary of what stalker where is. Mm hmm.

Yeah. So so so stalkerware, like as a category encompasses like a number of different types of apps, most of them like on the surface advertise themselves as like parental control software, which is already bad enough. Yeah, to be clear, that is like advertised for like spying on your children's phone, like seeing their location in the real time, seeing their messages that they receive, any photo they take. Ostensibly, this is to like prevent bullying and help with

them when they get depressed because they don't trust you and talk to you for whatever reason. But obviously, a lot of these are done furthermore, because that's like that sure, that's a like target audience, that's a demographic you can advertise to but then there's this even bigger potential target demographic of people who are insecure in their relationship mostly men not only men But who are then salt this idea that they can use software like this For stalking their partner for finding out if they are cheating on you things like that Which is obviously an even bigger problem Which once again not to discount the problems for that spying on your children is already

like bad enough. But yeah, this lead this leads to this whole like big industry of these apps being used by partners against each other, like also just by people like against anyone in the in their surroundings that they suspect might be doing something shady might be like talking behind their backs. It often kind of turns into like it obviously turns into this obsessive thing, especially if you're solved this idea that this app can magically solve like interpersonal issues like with anything that sells you this magic idea of being able to solve any problem that these people start kind of spying on everyone in their like, circles, to some of

them, like not everyone most like a lot of people on these buying like their partner or like their child or whatever. But it often like spirals out of control into this like controlling everyone and their surroundings, knowing what everyone is up to where they are, and spending like hundreds of dollars a month on doing so. And yeah, that's pretty fucked up if you ask me. Yeah. Yeah.

One of the things that's interesting too, it's also in a lot of cases, illegal. This is going to vary, you know, from country to country and state to state. But in the U S there are states like California, which gets pointed out in the very good tech crunch investigation on truth spy, where there are really strict laws that journalists like have to abide by as to when you can record someone that these apps absolutely break. Yes, it's specifically a thing that also most of these apps will have like a disclaimer at the bottom that is like, this might be illegal in your jurisdiction and please ask for consent before doing this.

And then they have lots of tutorials on how to install this in someone's device without their consent. Yeah. It's always like, hey, we do not take any, it's not our fault if you break the law, basically. Which obviously, it's so far, not a lot of this has been challenged in court, but I don't think this would hold up too long. Oh, god, no. But I don't think just saying, we

make a product to do crimes with, if you do crimes with it, it's not. I mean, it works for the gun industry. So Yeah, the difference is that like with the gun industry It's a product where there is a legal and an illegal like clear way to do it The thing with stock or as well as that like a lot of them will also explicitly say the only real use of this We allow you to do to use it for is to surveil your child, which unfortunately is legal in most jurisdictions because children are property of their parents. Uh, in quotes, because I do not agree with that, but, uh, yeah, it's, it's one

of those things where people using it, like someone installing an app on their exes or their partner's phone or whatever without consent could, could very easily, would lose any court case. Whether or not the company would get in trouble, I think is gonna rely a lot on the stuff, the videos they're posting about like how to get these apps on people's phones without them knowing. But like they do have that out with like, no, it's just for surveilling children, which is great.

And for anyone else, you need consent or whatever. But I think it is important, yeah, to point this out very early for anyone who's listening to this because they think they might have stalker on their phones or because they know they have stalker on their phones. You can use this in a domestic abuse case. This will immediate. This is explicit proof that abuse is happening no matter anything else,

because like that's the thing generally with domestic abuse cases. It's really hard to prove abuse is happening Stalker where and any other type of spying device like also physical GPS device trackers and stuff That is immediate proof that there is a that there's controlling behavior going on That you are being spied on this cannot only be used and is explicitly admissible evidence This is also usually like makes cases worse like not not for you like it just yeah It like I can potentially add charges and make it more serious in it It can help making cops give a shit about like abuse which yeah, I hate that

I need to say that but yeah, it's like it makes it more serious because there's like spyware and whatever. It's easy evidence. First off, like you can prove they're spying on you. And second, if you are in one of the states where that violates the law, then you can immediately say this person is breaking the law. Like we don't have to debate whether or not they've they've crossed a line. Yeah. And even if it doesn't directly break the law to spy on someone, on a partner, like

it depending on the on the region, it can be kind of a hazy like thing, especially if it's a device you might co-own if it's like a state where you were with like co possession or whatever in the US, I do not know US law very much around this. But yeah, there's like laws like that. But usually still the fact that you're being spied on can be used as proof for other abuse things you might be alleging, because it's like hard proof that something is happening. And also, usually these companies will somewhat have to respond to SAPOINAS.

So they will have to give out like who the account owner is behind like the spying on your phone. For some of them, we can. There's also tools that help you find out who is spying on you, or there is like, someone with forensic background can help. Yeah. And I think people, one thing we should note is that if you're kind of curious,

has my device been infected by some of these tools? The one that we've been talking about most, TruthSpy, if you go to that TechCrunch article. Or to my article, it also has a link. Or to your article on your website. There's a tool you can use where it'll tell you how to get your IMSI. I M I I. Yeah.

Which you just dial a thing on your phone and it gives you that number. It's basically how you identify specific phones. And you plug that in. It will let you know if your device has been compromised. Now, like December last year, up until there is the data. And if you can pretty much tell you if you've been spying on using this specific tool until then. For other stuff, there is also guides,

usually on TechCrunch and otherwise also on stopstalkerware.org, which is the US coalition against stalkerware. And also just generally, I think a lot of like more local anti-stalking, anti-abuse orcs are not as informed yet as they should be, but there's still a good like point also to reach out to or like, yeah. Yeah. Now one of my questions about Truth Spy that I'm hoping you can answer is I know that you can like text messages get transferred via it, like your call records, all that kind of stuff get and who you were

calling. Does that include messages for like encrypted apps like Signal or is that not accessible through this? It depends. Like for some of these it will like get Signal messages, WhatsApp messages and everything generally by reading the notification content. Because from notifications, you know what messages have been received. Sometimes it will only then have the received messages and not the sent messages.

Often these also include a keylogger component that maps messages then sent back as well. It depends a lot what these apps collect. But for most of them, also the collection for other texting apps is usually kind of broken. None of these apps are really well maintained. They're mostly just quick cash grabs.

And the harder to maintain features usually don't really work. And it seems like based on that, one thing people can do outside of checking to see if their device has been compromised is do stuff like turn off notifications for apps like Signal, right? Like, and that's, that's actually just generally good advice.

Notifications are a, are a compromise of the security that's, that Signal offers don't have them enabled, you know? Yeah. And, or at the very least disable them on the lock screen on Android. Yeah. I don't know if that, I think that's also possible on iOS, but I think iOS doesn't show message them on the lock screen on Android. I don't know if that's also possible on iOS. But I think iOS doesn't show message content on the lock screen anyways.

I'm not sure anymore. But yeah, it's just also small things like that. And also one of the key tells that someone probably tampered with your phone, especially for Android, is if Google Play Protect is disabled, and you do not remember disabling it for something else. It was almost definitely disabled because someone installed something on your phone. Just try re-enabling it and it will probably tell you something.

The thing also to keep in mind if you find stalkerware on your phone, please get professional help. Do not just delete it. Do not necessarily confront whoever you think might be your abuser about it, unless you're very sure that that's the situation you can handle. Because like, yeah, that is one of those things that like bringing it up or just deleting it can very quickly lead to like, yeah, complicating the situation a lot. You know what else complicates the situation? These ads. the intersections of identity are celebrated. Ooh chat, this year we have had some of our favorite people

on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angelica Ross and more. Make sure you listen to the Black Fat Fam podcast on the iHeart Radio app, other podcasts or whatever you get your podcast girl. Ooh, I know that's right. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising,

and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds

and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey, I'm Gianna Prenti. And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline,

the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking, yay, I can finally buy a new phone. But you also have a lot of questions like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401k? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tute, AKA Your Rich BFF, to break it all down.

I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single year, you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10% to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10% to 15%, and you end up getting 8%, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, 10 to 15, and you end up getting eight, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple

podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the aftermath of a transformative election like the one we just had, it's hard to read the news without asking yourself every five seconds, how did we get here? That's exactly what we're always trying to figure out on Fiasco, a history podcast from the co-creators of Slow Burn. In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point

in American politics, the 2000 election, which came down to a recount in Florida and ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history. In many ways, it's the beginning of the story we're living through right now. So if you're trying to make sense at the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore, and find out how a statistical tie in the Florida vote count put the nation into an unprecedented holding pattern, during which American voters waited with bated breath to find out whether Al Gore

or George W. Bush would be the next president of the United States. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. I'm a psychology professor at Yale, and I started to notice that a lot of my students weren't all that happy. So I created a new class. Welcome everybody to psychology and the good life. It became the biggest class in the history of you. I'm a little bit surprised to see as many of you are here as are here, but that's great. But it's not just my students who need to

understand the science of well-being. And that's why we launched the Happiness Lab, so you can learn about it too. Are you ready to feel happier? Head to the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or if you like to listen. Brought to you by the 2024 Subaru share the love event now through January 2nd. And we are back. So when it comes to the actual fight against this stuff, obviously what you're doing is a big part of it. Getting inside these companies and finding out

like what they're doing and their capabilities is huge. For in terms of like what regular people or people who are interested in becoming activists about this can do, what is the struggle to actually fight this stuff look like? Like how do we put a bullet in this industry's head? I think one of the biggest things and also like why I do the work I do with like hacking

and with encouraging others to like send me data, be that insiders from these companies, sending it either to me or like TechCrunch specifically currently, because like me and TechCrunch are like the only people really doing like journalism on this like regularly. And the important thing with with journalism and all of this is awareness.

It's very important to create awareness about this. That's also why I do the media work with being on this podcast and things like that. I think the most important thing is to make people aware, talk about this in your feminist circles or whatever, things like that. Especially bring it up just also in like general info things about abuse or how to detect abuse. I think the most important thing to do against

stalker whereas demystify it because most people don't even know that this is a thing that this is it like that there's just commercially available spyware that anyone can install on your phone. It's important to not like give in to some sort of paranoia as with any of these things. It's just important to like, yeah, generate awareness, talk about it, and like, spread these articles. Let friends know that this is a potential thing. And then, yeah, the hard thing with this is that like, obviously, it should probably help if there was some sort of legislation against some of this. It's gonna be very hard to get any proper legislation that ends this industry because in most Western countries, which are the only countries which unfortunately would have enough power to like actually get these apps shut down because that's the world we live in.

But the problem there is usually that like this notion that children are owned by their parents is too strong to really make a full case against these apps. And at the very best, what I can, the very best I'm kind of hoping for from legislators, it's just a ban on advertising these apps on use against other adults, which would be big already. But that doesn't really solve the issue, because there's still going to be enough people who know of their use for use against adults,

and there's going to be enough people on Reddit threads talking about, hey, well, yeah, you're not sure if your government is cheating on you. You can just use this app, you know. That's also how most of this marketing for this works. It's just, yeah, at the end of the day, this is like a patriarchal issue. So yeah, I think that's also why I am so focused on the hacking and the blowing these companies up and showing who's behind them.

It's because at the end of the day, the most effective thing we have against these companies is the grassroots movement of making them too scared to run in this business, making it not profitable enough. Because as I said, most of this is like quick cash grabs from like web design studios and outsourcing companies. Yeah. That, that is making a quick buck from this because otherwise they don't get paid enough.

Like that's the sad thing really is how much of this industry is in all of these countries, Western companies outsource their IT too, because there's lots of IT companies there and they are entirely reliant on Western companies giving them very underpaid tasks. You have this problem that you now have a bunch of employees and not enough money to always pay them. And what do you do? You find some weird niche of a tech product you can quickly build. And this is one of those easy niches. It's always this scummy stuff. You find some weird niche of a tech product you can quickly build.

This is one of those easy niches. It's always this scummy stuff. That's also why so many of these companies are based out of Vietnam, out of Iran and whatever. It's just companies that already have it hard enough to do business globally where the IT industry is falling apart because there's not enough local customers in anything that's international. You're just the cheap workforce, right? So yeah, it's once again, also like a class problem. I don't think most people working in this industry know that they're working in a scummy industry.

Yeah, of course. But yeah, you got to get paid and that's- Yeah. And that's why I think making it more scary to operate in this industry is like yes They wait to go because like with with just like these like four Hacks that have happened against these companies over the last like half a year or so two of them Three of them three of them have shut down Completely others seem to be slowly moving towards just

building other software primarily. Yeah. It's just like, yeah, it's like with any other like shady industry that the best we can do is just to not make it profitable to run the software because at the very best anything else we will get is just pushing them more into the shadows, which is not going to solve the issue at all. Yeah. I, I think a lot about like strategic thinking, which I do believe is kind of often in part because of how rightfully negative most people on the left think about the military, there's a tendency to ignore some of like the theory around how to actually win a conflict and all of it,

all strategy really, when you're talking about like defeating an opponent revolves around denying and taking operational area from them. Right. Yeah. And that's what you're talking about. When you talk about, well, we need to stop this, you know, one of the first things we can do as part of fighting this is to stop them from being able to advertise certain places.

Right. It's, it's making sure that they're not able to operate without being seen. It's basically cutting, cutting down their area, their space to maneuver, their ability to profit, which cuts down their money, their access to people, their ability to actually like operate, right? Like that's, that's what we're looking at in terms of how do you kill this stuff? It's not one single really, I use the, the comparison comparison of like a bullet but it's never going to be one bullet These things are too durable. There's too many countries that play to do that. Yeah That's also why I like put so much emphasis on doing media work about this

I'm getting more people to talk about this and getting more awareness of it this out there to the point where i'm willing to work with more conservative newspapers on this because everyone needs to know about this at the end of the day. This is how we stop people from falling victims to this. Most people who are a victim of stockover apps have never heard of stockover apps before. And I think that's one of the biggest ways to tackle this. And on the other hand, we also have, I think, another big leverage point with how many of these are getting hacked, because none of these apps are very secure. That's another thing, is this can also be leveraged against the abusers in this scenario. I think just pointing out to them that all of these apps get hacked all the time, and that this is how they get found out, that this is how their data of them as abusers ends up landing on the internet. I think that's also like a very important angle at the end of the day.

It's just to make it clear, like, yeah, no, not even you are like. Secure from this, having consequences for your life, like beyond like direct interpersonal or legal consequences, this can and in the past has result in like your email address being on a list of people who do abuse to people online. You don't want to be on such a list. I think that's also important just to point out. There isn't one stockover app that's not eventually going to get hacked.

There is a big war against these apps. There are so many different hacking groups that keep sending me data from these. I'm already working on another article that already once again affects like the data of like, I think like 80,000 more like abusers and it's just abuser data this time, but I'm still going to report on it. Like it's, it's, it's, this is not going to stop. It's even also not going to stop when I stop reporting on this myself. Like I've, there's been work before me done on this. I also, the first time I got involved in finding Stalkerware was back in 2020.

People have been hacking these apps forever and will keep hacking them. Like, just look at the Wikipedia page for Stalkerware. There's an ever-growing list of these apps that have been hacked. And I think at this point, the like official count being kept by one of the people at TechCrunch is that like 13 apps, a few of which have been hacked two or three times. Yeah.

These are not secure apps for anyone. No, no, no, of course not. Yeah. And they, yeah, I mean, it makes sense that like an app dedicated to violating people's privacy for money would also basically violate the privacy of the people using it. Yeah. And also they don't care.

Like, like I said, it's a, it's a cash grab. It's nothing else. There's a few apps that are like a little more than a cash grab, but it's usually just because they're made. Like there's still a cash grab, but they're like more well-made well made but that's because they're a cash grab from a company that has better developers or more money to do the initial investment. The thing is also like most of these companies don't have a lot of initial investment and I think the important thing to consider as well here is one big area of this that I have not yet started tackling, but I do want to like look into more

sometime is a big reason this industry is so big. And most of these apps have a lot of users, despite there being so many of them is the affiliate marketing industry. Once again, our very beloved friend. Yeah, all of these apps are parts of various affiliate marketing networks. Some of them started by Stalker, a rare company. Some of them just other like things that advertise all the shady things, like all those phone number locator apps or whatever. That's also part of those same affiliate marketing networks. And there's lots of money flowing here and there's lots of money flowing to very big tech YouTube channels.

And I might soon have some proof for some of that but that's how these are advertised it's everyone who advertises stalkerware to you who has a big platform is doing that because they're getting money not for any other reason we need to do more ads we will be back shortly back shortly. Hey everyone, it's John also known as Dr. John Paul, and I'm Jordan or Joe Ho. And we are the BlackFatFilm Podcast,

a podcast where all the intersections of identity are celebrated. Ooh, chat. This year we have had some of our favorite people on including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angela Carrasque, and more. Make sure you listen to the Black Fat Fam podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcast, girl. Ooh, I know that's right. Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex positive and deeply entertaining That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right.

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That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. That's right. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeart Radio app, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Hey, I'm Gianna Prenti.

And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, the early career podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. One of the most exciting things about having your first real job is that first real paycheck. You're probably thinking,

yay, I can finally buy a new phone. Mm-hmm, but you also have a lot of questions. Like, how should I be investing this money? I mean, how much do I save? And what about my 401K? Well, we're talking with finance expert Vivian Tute, AKA Your Rich BFF, to break it all down. I always get roasted on the internet when I say this out loud, but I'm like, every single

year you need to be asking for a raise of somewhere between 10 to 15%. I'm not saying you're going to get 15% every single year, but if you ask for 10 to 15 and you end up getting 8, that is actually a true raise. Listen to this week's episode of Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. In the aftermath of a transformative election like the one we just had, it's hard to read the news

without asking yourself every five seconds, how did we get here? That's exactly what we're always trying to figure out on Fiasco, a history podcast from the co-creators of Slow Burn. In our first season, Bush v. Gore, we examine an unmistakable turning point in American politics, the 2000 election, which

came down to a recount in Florida and ended with one of the most controversial rulings in Supreme Court history. In many ways, it's the beginning of the story we're living through right now. So if you're trying to make sense of the present moment, check out Fiasco, Bush v. Gore, and find out how a statistical tie in the Florida vote count

put the nation into an unprecedented holding pattern, during which American voters waited with bated breath to find out whether Al Gore or George W. Bush would be the next president of the United States. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm Dr. Laurie Santos. I'm a psychology professor at Yale,

and I started to notice that a lot of my students weren't all that happy. So I created a new class. Welcome, everybody, to psychology and the good life. It became the biggest class in the history of you. I'm a little bit surprised to see as many of you are here as are here, but that's great. But it's not just my students who need to understand the science of well-being. And that's why we launched the happiness lab so you can learn about it too. Are you ready to feel happier? Head to the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or if you like to listen.

Brought to you by the 2024 Subaru Share the Love event, now through January 2nd. And we are back. Well, that's all I had, Mia. What do you got? Yeah, I guess there's another thing I wanted to ask a little bit about, which Zach Whitaker, who's been one of the journalists at TechCrunch doing a lot of the research. Yeah, he's great.

One of the things that he brings up that I think is another I know it's kind of a playing with fire angle on them. But one of the issues that these companies seem to have is. Payment platforms, because a lot of payment platforms look at this and go, wait, hold on. Yeah. So, yeah, I was really checked about that a little bit. That's an angle we've also been fighting on a lot like me and Sang. We work on most of these stories together.

Like, it's kind of funny, we both got each other into the stockover thing back in 2020, as I mentioned. That was the first time I stumbled into a stockover app with a security issue. I reached out to some random journalist at TechCrunch about it. And now he is the only one talking about this forever, because I reached out to him that one time,

and he got sucked into this horrible, horrible world of spying. But yeah, one of the things we focus on a lot is reporting these companies to their payment providers, to their server hosters, to the point where sometimes like for weeks, SAC will just wait for them to switch to a new provider after we got them taken out from like PayPal.

And then from their other PayPal account where they're just using like the checkout experience from one of their completely unrelated software projects, which they will later claim is not related at all, and they are different companies and whatever. But then eventually they get taken down from that as well. And usually we can get them taken down from most Western hosters, especially US hosters will immediately take them down.

You do not want to risk the company hosting this by-wire on US grounds. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you just like same with EU host there's like the few companies that we've seen that were on heads and they immediately react because it's like yeah, no, like under you a lot you don't want to like risk that and also just because you don't want to host that like there's no reason for you to host shit like that. It will have like image consequences. And that's an important thing that is maybe also something you can do as more like a grassroots thing. It's also like if you find one of these apps and if you see

oh they're using like PayPal or whatever. Just reach out. I think PayPal is even harder to reach as like just an average layperson. Don't expect them to reply. They might still take action. You will have to manually check. Paypal doesn't really reply to things ever, but yeah, same most of them have like hosting company. If you see they're hosted on like a European or American hosting company, I just, just reach out and be like, Hey, there's someone running stock spyware

on your thing. Also used the word spyware, not stalker where they will not know what that is. And it is spyware. So yeah. And that can spyware. So yeah. And that can usually get them taken down and often they don't have proper backups and will have a few months of data missing. And it's like, yeah, that's how you slowly grind them to a halt. Yeah. And also, once again, like if you have tips about any of these companies,

be it having found a vulnerability just or insider info, especially, I'm always very happy about insider info. You can reach out to either me or Zach Whitaker. We're both very happy to talk about this. Yeah. Yeah, that's something that's been used really effectively by right wingers to target sex workers.

It's been a huge thing. There's been a bunch of campaigns to get platform companies. And yeah, so it's, it's interesting that for once we can use the very restrictive and conservative rules of payment providers for our good. Yeah. But yeah, basically any of the big payment providers will not respect something like this. Some of the like small regional odd ones probably won't really give a shit. They have no reason to. It's like revenue for them. But

yeah, it's generally worth trying. And I'm always glad like if someone just reaches out to these companies and we don't have to do that ourselves. I think me and second to a few other people like actively working in this are doing more than enough work currently. But yeah, like just if you find one of these things, don't go digging too deep, it's a depressing world. But if you stumble upon one of these somewhere or whatever, just report them. It's gonna disrupt their operations and if it happens often enough, they might just give up. Yeah. And I mean like in cases like the Truth Spy spy they are willing to do extreme amounts of fraud to To get to money easily because they like started with like mostly just in like with the market

They could get with their Vietnamese payment providers, right? And when she they realized well the US is like this really big market, right? But for really easy like US stuff we need like a PayPal thing right, so they made like over 12 fake American identities with fake passports and fake addresses and signed up to PayPal a whole bunch of times and had various employees at the company move money around. Yeah that's obviously not a thing the US government will like if you do that Generally speaking they moved like millions like that. So yeah Which is pretty crazy like that the money that amount of money that's moving in this industry is crazy

Like yeah, actually like most of these app apps will be half broken Which no one ever complains about because like it's shady out like you don't expect, like if you go online and you search for something shady, like anything, like be it piracy or whatever, you don't expect it to be the best experience ever. Like you know you're getting some weird service and it's probably gonna be half broken. But yeah, like most of these talkable apps start at like $40 a month and more.

And then sometimes for more features, you pay like up to 60 or 70 or so. And then all of these have you pay like up to 60 or 70 or so. And then all of these have like tens of thousands of users, sometimes hundreds of thousands of users. Yeah, you can do the math yourself. It's crazy. This is a really big industry, which makes it so crazy to me that it's like not a thing that's talked about more, especially in like feminist spaces and things like that, because this is such a like big angle of like modern tech enabled abuse that I, yeah,

really think should be more of a topic. Yeah. Especially on the left, like this is bad. Yeah, no, this is like critically bad. I agree entirely. And also like the whole thing with like all of this data being so easily accepted, your data can end up getting sold on some dark web forum. You're both as the abuser and as the target, right? And the government

can find these. Like I have no, like this is, this is not me making a statement of that's a thing that's happening, but there's nothing preventing the government from hacking these companies and getting shit. Like, like I sometimes like whenever I get these data sets, and it's always hard to work with data sets that include like, non-consensually collect the data of people, right? Yes. But like, I do always like do some due diligence checks, like mostly trying to find if the government is using a specific app, sometimes yes, there is always like the odd correction law of the officer who has signed up for one or two of these apps or, or like education people and whatever. But then I also sometimes searched through the text messages for just some

code words and the amount of people moving drugs, uh, have stock aware on their phones. It's, you know, Yeah. And it's, it's one of those things where there are laws, like technically, if I, if my understanding of the laws around this are correct, it is illegal for an organization like the FBI to utilize these apps, but yes, but we have an organized and culture NSA who, and it is, it is on paper illegal for them to do this with a third party app.

But one thing that often gets done, particularly by the FBI, but not just by them, is it's not illegal for law enforcement agencies to contract with private agencies. And if those agencies, you just don't check in on what they're doing. You know what they're using. But like, yeah. Or like if an informant sends you if an informant like sends you this data like you're not gonna say no exactly exactly and also you don't really need to disclose that

because it's information coming up from an informant you do not need to disclose that informant in court ever so yeah it's like it's it's very there are there are ways around you know the laws that we put up not that we shouldn't continue to extend those laws, but you shouldn't, just because, well, they're not allowed to use this, doesn't mean they can't get access to the info. Yeah. Yeah. And also there's all this important thing, like also globally, there's other governments that can't just be using this.

For one of the apps I got the data for... Yeah, the Indian government and the Russian government don't give a shit. There was also another thing where I, for one of the apps I got data for, there was some indication that at some point the Colombian national police did a bigger evaluation of using commercials, spyware for their use. Because you're in a country with not that big of a police budget in comparison, you can't afford all the cool Israeli tools everyone else has. So what do you do? You just look for random apps you can find you know yeah you you find the Walmart

the Kirkland version the wish.com version I guess yeah yeah yeah yeah Alibaba spyware right yeah I don't think most of them moved forward with this because these apps fucking suck like they're bad like that's that's the other thing like they don't even really do their job well they're bad and you don't know who is behind them you cannot even go up to someone and be like yo don't do this you also cannot go to the cops and be like this company is scamming me because yeah I assume some people have probably done that before but it does involve admitting to a crime so yeah yeah, it's like, yeah, these companies just get away with not

giving a shit about their product because like, yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's, that's all we had. Thank you, Maya, for both the work you're doing and for talking to us. Yeah. Is there anything you wanted to plug before we, uh, we roll out here? Just my, just my blog, I think we're, where I do this journalistic work and also more. There's about to be another cool investigative piece out soon, which tangentially involves

more tracking and whatever. And also involves Hollywood and more. It's a crazy big story, I promise. That will be out hopefully in a month or so. But yeah, my blog at Maya dot crime you dot gay crime us and crime w. Yeah, and gay as in gay. Yeah, yeah, just check out my blog at the bottom of the blog. There's all my links to my social media for anyone who's like listening to this and has been wondering where I am. I am back on Twitter as well. Yeah. For now. For now.

That's for all of us these days. That's always like a- That's just how it is at this point. But yeah, I am back on Twitter. I'm posting there sometimes. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you and thank you all for listening. We will be back tomorrow, unless this comes out on a Friday, in which case we'll be back at some other point, but soon. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, CoolZoneMedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here, updated monthly at coolzonedmedia.com. Thanks for listening.

Hey everyone, it's John, also known as Dr. John Paul. And I'm Jordan, or Joe Ho. And we are the BlackFatFilm Podcast. A podcast where all the intersections of identity are celebrated. Ooh, chat. This year we have had some of our favorite people on, including Kid Fury, T.S. Madison, Amber Ruffin from the Amber and Lacey Show, Angela Carrasso, and more. Make sure you listen to the Black Fat Film Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast,

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