Washington (dpa) – It could be the worst nightmare and especially for someone cheating on his spouse: a computer program that stealthily records every keystroke, reads all your e-mail, and even registers chat room conversations word for word.
Get used to it. Originally designed for parents trying to control their children’s Internet habits, the software Spector has taken off in popularity recently, thanks to thousands of men and women who have purchased the program to find out whether their partners are cheating.
“I was able to identify my fiance’s true personality,” said Crystal, a Spector user from Seattle, Washington. “I found all 17 of his girlfriends, and was able to truly see what a sick and twisted individual he really is.”
Spectorsoft, the software’s U.S.-based developer, is scrambling to release international versions of its software, an effort to capitalize on worldwide demand and to satisfy the public’s wish to spy on others.
Available from www.spectorsoft.com for 70 dollars, Spector is likely to be seen as a bargain for those intent on finding out just what friends, colleagues, or spouses are doing on-line.
Spectorsoft makes no attempt to hide the fact that Spector’s prime audience consists of suspicious husbands and wives. The area of Spectorsoft’s site that features customer feedback is dominated by comments from victims of adultery.
“Your software allowed me to learn the entire truth,” writes one man, now better informed about his wife’s habits on-line. “I know when and with whom she committed adultery, and how she lied to me about her on-line activities,” adds the man.
A woman from Los Angeles praises Spector copiously: “We’ve been married 20 years and I had no idea my husband was cheating on me until I got Spector. If I didn’t have this software, I’d be buying his (story) that he’s a changed man.”
Tales of cheating husbands and wives and broken hearts are not uncommon to the makers of the program.
In the Washington Post, 46-year-old Greg recently described how he observed his wife’s flirtation on the Internet for weeks. The program Spector allowed him to track all the sexual advances she was making to a man in Nebraska. The result: Greg filed for divorce, after 22 years of marriage.
Currently, the software is available only in English. But international versions of Spector are due to appear before the end of the year, Doug Fowler, the chief executive of Spectorsoft, told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.
Fowler said he expected high sales of Spector internationally. In the United States, third quarter sales of the software were up by a factor of seven compared to last year.
Spector and other surveillance programs function much like a videocassette recorder. The software records everything that a user does on a PC, and then plays it back on request. Even passwords can be decoded using the software.
While Spectorsoft discourages installing its surveillance program without the knowledge of other family members, the company also provides instructions designed to allow even computer novices to install the software in such a manner as to make detection difficult, even by experts.
U.S.-based magazine Newsweek recently reported a case in which a woman caught her husband cheating with the help of a similar program. The woman filed for divorce without ever telling her husband how she had found out about his affair.
In the New York Times, a woman described how she found out that her husband visits porn Web sites on a regular basis, boasting in chat-rooms that he had been having an affair for the past 15 years.
The woman filed for divorce, and her husband was presented with dozens of pages of transcripts of his Internet escapades by her lawyer.
Many legal experts are still unsure about how to respond to Spector and other surveillance software. One thing is clear: current legislation protecting privacy was not designed with surveillance software in mind.
Attorney Mike Goodwin said he was not sure whether using the software was legal or not, but is curious to know whether anyone is spying on his computer. Simson Garfinkel, American author of a book about the dangers to privacy in the age of the Internet, is demanding federal regulation of the software.
Other experts don’t see the need for legislation, claiming that men and women have always secretly read their spouses’ diaries. Software such as Spector simply constitutes a modern version of such practices, they argue.
