Who is your husband calling when you’re not around? Is your teenager sexting? What do your employees really think about you? If you’re curious — and you’re not too concerned with whether you have to break the law to find out — there’s an app out there to get you started.
It’s called iKeyGuard, and for $9.99, it gives you full access to every action performed on someone’s Apple iPhone or iOS mobile device. Logs of all texts, calls and emails, both sent and received, are sent via email to your smartphone, while the targets of your covert operation remain unaware they are being spied on, the security firm Sophos reported.
Unlike some keystroke loggers, which require hardware like a USB drive to be plugged into a computer, the iKeyGuard software runs silently in the background of a person’s iPhone, using minimal computing power to track every button a person presses.
To install iKeyGuard, users first have to "jailbreak" their iPhone or iOS device. (Jailbreaking is the process of installing software that allows you to modify your device's file system.) From there, it’s a bit of legal gray area.
“Logging other people without their permission might be illegal in your country,” iKeyGuard’s website explains. The legality of iKeyGuard, the company explains, “depends on your local law and on the exact usage of the application.”
Sophos’ Chester Wisniewski takes a stronger stance on iKeyGuard’s fuzzy legal implications.
“Unless you have a habit of drunk texting and then deleting all your own SMSs, I can’t think of a legitimate, legal use case for this. Can you?”