Apple confirmed Friday that it “can no longer” offer a security feature that allows users in the United Kingdom to encrypt their iCloud data.
In a statement provided to TechCrunch, Apple spokesperson Fred Sainz said the company’s Advanced Data Protection feature will no longer be available to new users and current U.K. users “will eventually need to disable this security feature.”
“We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP will not be available to our customers in the U.K. given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy,” the company said.
“Enhancing the security of cloud storage with end-to-end encryption is more urgent than ever before,” the statement said.
The announcement comes after the U.K. government reportedly ordered Apple earlier this year to build a backdoor that would allow British authorities “blanket” access to users’ data stored on Apple’s cloud servers, even if it is end-to-end encrypted. This request, seen as unprecedented in a modern democracy, alarmed privacy and security experts, who argued that if the British government prevailed, the demand would set a precedent for authoritarian countries to follow.
Apple offers users the option to turn on end-to-end encrypted iCloud backups through Advanced Data Protection. This feature effectively makes it impossible for anyone, including Apple and government authorities, to view data stored in iCloud by users’ who have opted-in.
A spokesperson for the U.K. Home Office did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
Apple did not immediately say how the process of disabling ADP will work for users who had already turned it on before Friday.
Apple said that some types of data, including health data, messages stored in iCloud, and payment information, which are end-to-end encrypted by default for all users, will not be affected by this change, and will remain encrypted for everyone. But U.K. users will not be able to opt-in to use end-to-end encryption for the other types of data, such as photos, notes, backups, and other data, which were encrypted under ADP.
For those who already have ADP enabled, Apple said it will give customers more guidance soon, as well as a period of time to disable the feature to keep using iCloud.
ADP is unaffected for users outside of the United Kingdom, Apple said, and end-to-end encrypted communication services like FaceTime and iMessage are not affected, either.
“As we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services and we never will,” Apple said, linking to its prior statements.
BBC News reported that ADP stopped being an option for new users starting at 3 p.m. U.K. time on Friday. TechCrunch has also confirmed that ADP is no longer an option for new users in the United Kingdom.
Since the rise of encryption in the mid-1990s, governments worldwide have argued that this data-scrambling technology would allow criminals and terrorists to break the law while evading law enforcement. Over the years, authorities have always found a way, from accessing unencrypted backups to using spyware, to access data directly on people’s devices.
“If you are not in the U.K., you should turn on ADP now,” said Matthew Green, a cryptography expert and teacher at Johns Hopkins University, wrote on X in response to the news.
“The more people who use it, the harder it will be to shut off this way,” said Green.
Clarified the forms of data protected under Advanced Data Protection in the ninth paragraph.
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Consumer-grade spyware apps that covertly and continually monitor your private messages, photos, phone calls, and real-time location are an ongoing problem for Android users.
This guide can help you identify and remove common surveillance apps from your Android phone, including TheTruthSpy, Cocospy and Spyic, among others.
Consumer-grade spyware apps are frequently sold under the guise of child monitoring or family-tracking software, but are referred to as “stalkerware” and “spouseware” for their ability to also track and monitor partners or spouses without their consent. These spyware apps are downloaded from outside of Google Play’s app store, planted on a phone without a person’s permission and often disappear from the home screen to avoid detection.
Stalkerware apps rely on abusing in-built Android features that are typically used by companies to remotely manage their employees’ work phones or use Android’s accessibility mode to snoop on someone’s device.
You may notice your phone acting unusually, running warmer or slower than usual, or using large amounts of network data, even when you are not actively using it.
Checking to see if your Android device is compromised can be done quickly and easily.
It’s important to have a safety plan in place and trusted support if you need it. Keep in mind that removing the spyware from your phone may alert the person who planted it, which could create an unsafe situation. The Coalition Against Stalkerware offers advice and guidance for victims and survivors of stalkerware.
Note that this guide only helps you to identify and remove spyware apps, it does not delete the data that was already collected and uploaded to its servers. Also, some versions of Android may have slightly different menu options. As is standard with any advice, you follow these steps at your own risk.
Google Play Protect is one of the best safeguards to protect against malicious Android apps by screening apps downloaded from Google’s app store and outside sources for signs of potentially malicious activity. Those protections stop working when Play Protect is switched off. It’s important to ensure that Play Protect is switched on to ensure that it’s working and scanning for malicious apps.
You can check that Play Protect is enabled through the Play Store app settings. You also can scan for harmful apps, if a scan hasn’t been done already.
Stalkerware relies on deep access to your device to access the data, and is known to abuse Android’s accessibility mode which, by design, requires broader access to the operating system and your data for screen readers and other accessibility features to work.
Android users who do not use accessibility apps or features should not see any apps in this section of Android’s settings.
If you do not recognize a downloaded service in the Accessibility options, you may want to switch it off in the settings and remove the app. Some stalkerware apps are disguised as ordinary looking apps and are often called “Accessibility,” “Device Health,” “System Service” or other innocuous-sounding names.
Much like the accessibility features, Android also allows third-party apps to access and read your incoming notifications, such as allowing smart speakers to read alerts out loud or your car to display notifications on its dashboard. Granting notification access to a stalkerware app allows for persistent surveillance of your notifications, which includes the contents of messages and other alerts.
You can check which apps have access to your notifications by checking your Android notification access settings under Special app access. Some of these apps you may recognize, like Android Auto. You can switch off notification access for any app that you do not recognize.
Other features commonly abused by stalkerware are Android’s device admin options, which have similar but even broader access to Android devices and users’ data.
Device admin options are usually used by companies to remotely manage their employees’ phones, such as wiping the phone in the event of device theft to prevent data loss. But these features also allow stalkerware apps to snoop on the Android display and the device’s data.
You can find the device admin app settings in Settings under Security.
Most people won’t have a device admin app on their personal phone, so be aware if you see an app that you don’t recognize, named something similarly obscure and vague like “System Service,” “Device Health” or “Device Admin.”
You may not see a home screen icon for any of these stalkerware apps, but they will still appear in your Android device’s app list.
You can view all of the installed apps in Android’s settings. Look for apps and icons that you don’t recognize. These apps may also show as having broad access to your calendar, call logs, camera, contacts and location data.
Force stopping and uninstalling a stalkerware app will likely alert the person who planted the stalkerware that the app no longer works.
If stalkerware was planted on your phone, there is a good chance that your phone was unlocked, unprotected or that your screen lock was guessed or learned. A stronger lock screen password can help to protect your phone from intruders. You should also protect email and other online accounts using two-factor authentication wherever possible.
If you or someone you know needs help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) provides 24/7 free, confidential support to victims of domestic abuse and violence. If you are in an emergency situation, call 911. The Coalition Against Stalkerware has resources if you think your phone has been compromised by spyware.
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There is a whole shady industry for people who want to monitor and spy on their families. Multiple app makers market their software — sometimes referred to as stalkerware — to jealous partners who can use these apps to access their victims’ phones remotely.
Yet, despite how sensitive this data is, an increasing number of these companies are losing huge amounts of it.
According to TechCrunch’s tally, counting the latest data exposures of Cocospy and Spyic, there have been at least 23 stalkerware companies since 2017 that are known to have been hacked or that leaked customers’ and victims’ data online. That’s not a typo: At least 23 stalkerware companies have either been hacked or had a significant data exposure in recent years. And four stalkerware companies were hacked multiple times.
Cocospy and Spyic are the first stalkerware companies in 2025 to have inadvertently exposed sensitive data. The two surveillance operations left messages, photos, call logs, and other personal and sensitive data of millions of victims exposed online, according to a security researcher who found a bug that allowed them to access that data.
In the case of Cocospy, the company leaked 1.81 million customer email addresses, and Spyic leaked 880,167 customer email addresses. That’s a total of 2.65 million email addresses, after removing duplicate addresses that appeared in both breaches, according to an analysis by Troy Hunt, who runs data breach notification site Have I Been Pwned.
In 2024, there were at least four massive stalkerware hacks. The last stalkerware breach in 2024 affected Spytech, a little-known spyware maker based in Minnesota, which exposed activity logs from the phones, tablets, and computers monitored with its spyware. Before that, there was a breach at mSpy, one of the longest-running stalkerware apps, which exposed millions of customer support tickets that included the personal data of millions of its customers.
Previously, an unknown hacker broke into the servers of the U.S.-based stalkerware maker pcTattletale. The hacker then stole and leaked the company’s internal data. They also defaced pcTattletale’s official website with the goal of embarrassing the company. The hacker referred to a recent TechCrunch article where we reported pcTattletale was used to monitor several front desk check-in computers at a U.S. hotel chain.
As a result of this hack, leak and shame operation, pcTattletale founder Bryan Fleming said he was shutting down his company.
Consumer spyware apps like mSpy and pcTattletale are commonly referred to as “stalkerware” (or spouseware) because jealous spouses and partners use them to surreptitiously monitor and surveil their loved ones. These companies often explicitly market their products as solutions to catch cheating partners by encouraging illegal and unethical behavior. And there have been multiple court cases, journalistic investigations, and surveys of domestic abuse shelters that show that online stalking and monitoring can lead to cases of real-world harm and violence.
And that’s why hackers have repeatedly targeted some of these companies.
Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a leading researcher and activist who has investigated and fought stalkerware for years, said the stalkerware industry is a “soft target.”
“The people who run these companies are perhaps not the most scrupulous or really concerned about the quality of their product,” Galperin told TechCrunch.
Given the history of stalkerware compromises, that may be an understatement. And because of the lack of care for protecting their own customers — and consequently the personal data of tens of thousands of unwitting victims — using these apps is doubly irresponsible. The stalkerware customers may be breaking the law, abusing their partners by illegally spying on them, and, on top of that, putting everyone’s data in danger.
The flurry of stalkerware breaches began in 2017 when a group of hackers breached the U.S.-based Retina-X and the Thailand-based FlexiSpy back to back. Those two hacks revealed that the companies had a total number of 130,000 customers all over the world.
At the time, the hackers who — proudly — claimed responsibility for the compromises explicitly said their motivations were to expose and hopefully help destroy an industry that they consider toxic and unethical.
“I’m going to burn them to the ground, and leave absolutely nowhere for any of them to hide,” one of the hackers involved then told Motherboard.
Referring to FlexiSpy, the hacker added: “I hope they’ll fall apart and fail as a company, and have some time to reflect on what they did. However, I fear they might try and give birth to themselves again in a new form. But if they do, I’ll be there.”
Despite the hack, and years of negative public attention, FlexiSpy is still active today. The same cannot be said about Retina-X.
The hacker who broke into Retina-X wiped its servers with the goal of hampering its operations. The company bounced back — and then it got hacked again a year later. A couple of weeks after the second breach, Retina-X announced that it was shutting down.
Just days after the second Retina-X breach, hackers hit Mobistealth and Spymaster Pro, stealing gigabytes of customer and business records, as well as victims’ intercepted messages and precise GPS locations. Another stalkerware vendor, the India-based SpyHuman, encountered the same fate a few months later, with hackers stealing text messages and call metadata, which contained logs of who called who and when.
Weeks later, there was the first case of accidental data exposure, rather than a hack. Spy Fone left an Amazon-hosted S3 storage bucket unprotected online, which meant anyone could see and download text messages, photos, audio recordings, contacts, location, scrambled passwords and login information, Facebook messages, and more. All that data was stolen from victims, most of whom did not know they were being spied on, let alone know their most sensitive personal data was also on the internet for all to see.
Other stalkerware companies that over the years have irresponsibly left customers’ and victims’ data online are Family Orbit, which left 281 gigabytes of personal data online protected only by an easy-to-find password; mSpy, which leaked over 2 million customer records in 2018; Xnore, which let any of its customers see the personal data of other customers’ targets, which included chat messages, GPS coordinates, emails, photos, and more; MobiiSpy, which left 25,000 audio recordings and 95,000 images on a server accessible to anyone; KidsGuard, which had a misconfigured server that leaked victims’ content; pcTattletale, which prior to its hack also exposed screenshots of victims’ devices uploaded in real time to a website that anyone could access; and Xnspy, whose developers left credentials and private keys in the apps’ code, allowing anyone to access victims’ data; and now Cocospy and Spyic, which left victims’ messages, photos, call logs, and other personal data, as well as customers’ email addresses, exposed online.
As far as other stalkerware companies that actually got hacked, there was Copy9, which saw a hacker steal the data of all its surveillance targets, including text messages and WhatsApp messages, call recordings, photos, contacts, and browser history; LetMeSpy, which shut down after hackers breached and wiped its servers; the Brazil-based WebDetetive, which also got its servers wiped, and then hacked again; OwnSpy, which provides much of the back-end software for WebDetetive, also got hacked; Spyhide, which had a vulnerability in its code that allowed a hacker to access the back-end databases and years of stolen data from around 60,000 victims; Oospy, which was a rebrand of Spyhide, shut down for a second time; and the latest mSpy hack, which is unrelated to the previously mentioned leak.
Finally there is TheTruthSpy, a network of stalkerware apps, which holds the dubious record of having been hacked or having leaked data on at least three separate occasions.
Of these 23 stalkerware companies, eight have shut down, according to TechCrunch’s tally.
In a first and so far unique case, the Federal Trade Commission banned SpyFone and its chief executive, Scott Zuckerman, from operating in the surveillance industry following an earlier security lapse that exposed victims’ data. Another stalkerware operation linked to Zuckerman, called SpyTrac, subsequently shut down following a TechCrunch investigation.
PhoneSpector and Highster, another two companies that are not known to have been hacked, also shut down after New York’s attorney general accused the companies of explicitly encouraging customers to use their software for illegal surveillance.
But a company closing doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. As with Spyhide and SpyFone, some of the same owners and developers behind a shuttered stalkerware maker simply rebranded.
“I do think that these hacks do things. They do accomplish things, they do put a dent in it,” Galperin said. “But if you think that if you hack a stalkerware company, that they will simply shake their fists, curse your name, disappear in a puff of blue smoke and never be seen again, that has most definitely not been the case.”
“What happens most often, when you actually manage to kill a stalkerware company, is that the stalkerware company comes up like mushrooms after the rain,” Galperin added.
There is some good news. In a report last year, security firm Malwarebytes said that the use of stalkerware is declining, according to its own data of customers infected with this type of software. Also, Galperin reports seeing an increase in negative reviews of these apps, with customers or prospective customers complaining they don’t work as intended.
But, Galperin said that it’s possible that security firms aren’t as good at detecting stalkerware as they used to be, or stalkers have moved from software-based surveillance to physical surveillance enabled by AirTags and other Bluetooth-enabled trackers.
“Stalkerware does not exist in a vacuum. Stalkerware is part of a whole world of tech-enabled abuse,” Galperin said.
Using spyware to monitor your loved ones is not only unethical, it’s also illegal in most jurisdictions, as it’s considered unlawful surveillance.
That is already a significant reason not to use stalkerware. Then there is the issue that stalkerware makers have proven time and time again that they cannot keep data secure — neither data belonging to the customers nor their victims or targets.
Apart from spying on romantic partners and spouses, some people use stalkerware apps to monitor their children. While this type of use, at least in the United States, is legal, it doesn’t mean using stalkerware to snoop on your kids’ phone isn’t creepy and unethical.
Even if it’s lawful, Galperin thinks parents should not spy on their children without telling them and without their consent.
If parents do inform their children and get their go-ahead, parents should stay away from insecure and untrustworthy stalkerware apps and use parental tracking tools built into Apple phones and tablets and Android devices that are safer and operate overtly.
Here’s the complete list of stalkerware companies that have been hacked or have leaked sensitive data since 2017, in chronological order:
Updated on February 20, 2025, to include Cocospy and Spyic as the latest set of buggy stalkerware apps.
If you or someone you know needs help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (1-800-799-7233) provides 24/7 free, confidential support to victims of domestic abuse and violence. If you are in an emergency situation, call 911. The Coalition Against Stalkerware has resources if you think your phone has been compromised by spyware.
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