The surveillance industry banned a stalkerware maker after a data breach leaked information of its customers and the people they were spying on. Consumer spyware company Support King can’t sell the surveillance software now, the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) said.
The FTC has denied founder Scott Zuckerman’s request to cancel the ban. It is also applicable to other subsidiaries OneClickMonitor and SpyFone.
Recently, the FTC announced the move in a press release when Zuckerman petitioned the agency to cancel the ban order in July of 2025.
The FTC banned Zuckerman from “offering, promoting, selling, or advertising any surveillance app, service, or business,” in 2021 and stopped him from running other stalkerware business. Zuckerman had to also delete all the data stored by SpyFone and went through various audits to implement cybersecurity measures for his ventures. Then acting director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, Samuel Levine said that the “stalkerware was hidden from device owners, but was fully exposed to hackers who exploited the company’s slipshod security.”
Zuckerman in his petition said that the FTC mandate has made it difficult for him to conduct other businesses due to monetary losses, even though Support King is out of business and he now only operates a restaurant and plans other ventures.
The ban came from a 2018 incident after a researcher discovered an Amazon S3 bucket of SpyFone that left important data such as selfies, chats, texts, contacts, passwords, logins, and
[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.
Read the original article: