Georgian Times: Mobile Spy Web-site Shuts Down Among Privacy Concerns, Crime Allegations
The Georgian Times reports on privacy questions over mobile spyware Web site Shpioni.ge:
Shpioni.ge offered widely-used smartphone spy software which allows you to silently record SMS text messages and GPS locations. It can be downloaded from its webpage and installed in Symbian-based handsets and its results are displayed in the private online accounts of clients.
The key message which the website used to advertise the product is that it would catch cheats: “70 percent of couples cheat on each other. Many people think that it is better not to know about these facts…We don’t want to destroy your private life, we want to prevent you becoming part of such a statistic…,” reads the webpage.
Tamar Kordzaia of the Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA) said that Shpioni.ge’s service is illegal and both its owners and users are committing a crime under the Criminal Code of Georgia.
“When a site offers us the chance to intercept someone’s correspondence and mobile phone communication this is an invasion of someone’s private life. The inviolability of private life is guaranteed by the Constitution of Georgia, which is the supreme law of the country,” Kordzaia noted. [...]
Mobile spy software use is illegal in many countries and legal concerns about such software are high on the agenda of such countries. Law experts say that both users and the software distribution companies could be considered in breach of the law. [...]
Georgian mobile operators are divided over the issue, but Magti says it is already dealing with it. Irakli Lobzhanidze, Marketing Director of MagtiCom, a mobile phone network, said that it sets a very bad precedent and the company is monitoring the system with the help of GPRS. “We are aware of this programme and by the end of this week we will be able to close the channel wherewith they get the call and sms information. After that Magti’s subscribers will be protected from shpioni.ge,” Lobzhanidze noted. Beeline’s Teona Bagdavadze told GT that the company does not consider that it is committing a crime or should be portrayed as the defendant in a case.
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