A new app is drawing controversy in Brazil. Called the "Boyfriend Tracker", it has been removed from Google Play after a public outcry. For what you say? Why, invasion of privacy of course.
The app was designed for your suspicious and untrustworthy other half to track the whereabouts of boyfriends.
The goal - apparently - is to save their precious relationships. Since love knows no bounds right? Except when invaded through an app.
All you have to do is steal your boyfriend's phone while he's in the shower, and then install the inconspicuous app called "Boyfriend Tracker" on his phone. It will cost $2/month, though we reckon suspicion will arise when he sees the bill.
Then slip it back to wherever you found the phone and let your boyfriend out into the wild. Using GPS, the app will record all of the places the boyfriend has been.
Then here's the last step: steal the phone again, and look at it.
This is a lousy strategy to begin with in the first place. And since no one was amused by it, the folks in Brazil
successfully campaigned to have the app pulled.
...[W]hen it comes to the cloak and dagger effort of catching philandering lovers, all high-tech weapons appear to be fair game — at least to the tens of thousands of Brazilians who downloaded "Boyfriend Tracker" to their smartphones before the stealthy software was removed from the Google Play app store last week, apparently in response to complaints about privacy abuses and its potential to be used for extortion or even stalking.
"Brazilians are a jealous people, what can I say? Of course it's going to be popular," said Marcia Almeida, a 47-year-old woman in Rio whose marriage ended seven years ago in large part because of what she said was her husband's infidelity.
"It's a different type of spying," she said of comparisons to the NSA surveillance program. "You're checking up on somebody you know intimately, not some stranger."
There are similar apps out there that do the same thing.