In this Vice Motherboard story, they dive into hacker claims of breaching and deleting data from a couple of companies in the business of producing so-called "stalkerware." This product is often targeted at jealous spouses and suspicious lovers to (often illegally) spy on their significant other.
This is software that is installed, presumably unknown to the user of the device, in order to spy on their activities. The spying consists of seeing all pictures (as new ones are taken even), access to all email, contacts, location, listening via the microphone, viewing call history and so on.
The Florida-based company Retina-X Studios, makers of a popular version of this software, was apparently hacked for a second time, although the company has denied this. This is a nasty category of software and that's why people are afraid of it.
When will it be removed if it's put there by a suspicious parter who is about to break up? Will the software continue to be monitored by others? Does it have a backdoor built into it? Can it be exploited for other purposes?
