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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: Google pays me to work on this. They do not pay me to talk about it online.

Stalkerware does exist on the App Store. The specific things that are possible differ on each platform (for example, getting access to calls and texts is a lot more involved on iOS and most apps will just let you unlock the device and access it directly instead) but there is plenty of potential for abuse on both platforms. In many ways the model is better on iOS with regards to these kinds of things, but we regularly deal with victims that are in situations where there does not exist a platform that I am aware of that can effectively stop stalkerware completely.

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Can you link to an example of a stalkerware app on iOS?

On iOS this is possible through management profiles. People use these as parental control apps:

For example: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/parental-control-app-ourpact/i...

This even allows you to live view a screen.

Apple doesn’t really tell you that you have a management profile setup.

I thought emergency reset is supposed to protect you from abusive people but I skimmed the support article and it seems like emergency reset does not remove management profiles: https://support.apple.com/en-asia/guide/personal-safety/ips2...

I guess it’s hard to balance, because a company probably doesn’t want their employees uninstalling MDM profiles.

> I guess it’s hard to balance, because a company probably doesn’t want their employees uninstalling MDM profiles.

I don't really understand why you would need technical measures for that. Surely a disconnected phone would quickly be noticed, and appropriate action can be taken by the business itself?

Detecting disconnections is never an easy problem to solve because you need to account for false positives like dead battery or lack of service. The battery could be dead for an entire night while someone sleeps. But it would only take twenty minutes to remove the MDM profile, exfiltrate company data, and then restore the profile.

This is why I think the future needs to be getting rid of these management profiles.

They do nothing other than buy folks a false sense of security.

Does lockdown mode not help here because abusers know the device passcode?

Lockdown mode is largely concerned with reducing attack surface for sophisticated remote attackers. The threat model is pretty different from this kind of stalkerware.

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