According to the study carried out by the firm SAPIO Research, 15% of Spaniards admit that they would monitor their partner’s digital activity through applications intended for this purpose. What’s more, 9% admit to having installed them on their romantic partner’s smartphone when suspecting infidelity.
These toxic behaviors even extend to the family environment and among close friends, who often engage in furtive glances at instant messaging conversations or notifications from those devices that we leave unattended.
Thus, when we talk about privacy regarding smartphones, we must not only think about the interests of cybercriminals: the ‘spies’ may be closer than we think. All the more reason to safeguard our digital life, which manufacturers such as Apple or Google seek through the options inherent to their operating systems (if not through the biometric sensors present in most terminals: fingerprint readers, facial recognition…).
How to catch a gossip
Those who take a ‘quick look’ at someone else’s phone thinking that they will get away with it, know that even the slightest movement is recorded. These are some basic checks to determine if someone has gotten their paws on our smartphone:
Open applications: Cleared myth Since closing all open applications on your mobile saves battery, the most common thing is that they remain running permanently. A single touch gesture on iOS or Android allows you to consult them in the order of opening, from the most recent to the one we used centuries ago.
The latter allows us to easily detect if someone has accessed our phone: why does WhatsApp appear in the first position if the last thing we used was Instagram? And Messenger (Facebook chat) if we never use it? They can be clear indicators of illicit access to the content of the terminal.
Messages or emails without notification: Indeed, chat applications tend to be the ones that distrustful spouses are most interested in. For this reason, it is often common to come across read messages that we do not remember or that we have not even been notified about. This is what happens when the gossip opens the ‘app’ without our consent: there is no way to restore the notification of these messages.
We must also pay attention to email applications: in most cases they allow an open letter to be marked as unread, so we must be especially aware of the summary of notifications or, as we said above, the order of opening the applications in progress .
Browser history: The web pages we visit (including those risqué ones) are another target of digital spies, who quickly and quickly go to the history of our browser. Although it is possible to delete it, we do not usually do so, which leaves the information exposed. This has its advantage, however: if someone clicks on any of the registered links, they automatically move to the first position in the list.
It doesn’t hurt to review our history to detect any suspicious activity. For example, if any page that we have visited in the last few hours has mysteriously disappeared from the list (since browsers also give the option to delete them).
Use time: In their efforts to make healthy use of technology, both Apple and Google offer usage statistics in the iOS and Android settings menus. They even inform us of changes in the average usage time we have given the phone during the last week. We must be suspicious of any excessive variation in this regard.
We can also consult the battery charge graph or the percentage of application consumption: is a peak of activity shown at times when we have not used the mobile phone? Has an app that we haven’t used for a while been using up more battery?
Definitive test: ‘cheating’ applications
As we say, many of the signs described can be undone if the gossip knows how (although the reality is that most of the time he barely has time, since he takes advantage of inattentions of just a few minutes to carry out his work). For this reason, if we want to be absolutely certain that someone has tried to unlock our phone, there is nothing better than applications designed expressly for this. These are some of the best rated:
■ Selfie to the intruder: Take a photo when someone tries to unlock the smartphone (successfully or unsuccessfully, at our discretion). It also automatically sends it to a Google Drive folder so that we can consult it at all times and from any device, which is very useful in case of theft.
■ Third Eye: Creates a record with the times in which the mobile phone has been unlocked and allows you to configure after how many failed attempts a photo is taken of whoever is behind the screen.
■ ‘Lockwatch’: With ‘Lockwatch’, the spy photo is automatically sent to the email address we indicate. Also the GPS location of the terminal, in case we have lost it or, again, it has been stolen.
■ WTMP: Also available for iOS, it has an additional function to those described: we can configure it so that an alarm sounds on the mobile if someone lifts it from the surface on which it is located (for example, if we have it face down on the table and someone try to turn it over).
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