The creator of an app to monitor cell phone activity, which when it was launched 25 years ago essentially served legal purposes, pleaded guilty this week to having developed and marketed a computer program to spy on other adults without their consent.
Em 2002, Bryan Fleming helped create the pcTattletalea computer program for monitoring the use of cell phones and computers.
Fleming’s tool recorded everything which was done on the target device, and the videos were uploaded to a server where they could be viewed by subscribers to the service offered by pcTattletale.
This may seem scary, but it also could be coolwhen used by a parent monitoring a child or by an employer monitoring the work of their employees.
Estes were the use cases which initially appeared on the pcTattletale website, where the program was presented as having “helped tens of thousands of parents to prevent daughters from meeting pedophiles“.
According to the website, companies could “monitor productivity, theft, lost hours and much more“, and even “police stations used it for investigations”.
However, somewhere along the way, the application stopped being a tool for legal use, and became a app de “stalkerware”which for years essentially served to “spy on unfaithful husbands“.
pcTattletale would end up closing its doors in 2024, after a data leak, and two years later, US federal prosecutors initiated an investigation investigation into Fleming’s conduct.
This week, almost 25 years after the release of pcTattletale, Bryan Fleming pleaded guiltyin a US federal court, of having knowingly “created and marketed a computer program to spy on other adults” without your consent.
In other words, says pcTattletale was often used to spy on romantic partners without their knowledge — and Fleming helped people do it.
It is unclear when pcTattletale began to be presented as a tool for catch traitorsbut Fleming’s original partner left the company in 2011, and Fleming then managed the company alone from his home, in a suburb north of Detroit.
In 2021, it was reported that pcTattletale was leak data sensitive that I collected. The report cited marketing materials about using the app to catch a “unfaithful spouse“, which required users to know their spouse’s “access code” and have “access to cell phone for 5 minutes”.
“The best time to do this is when they are sleeping“, explained the application’s marketing material. The company also provided users with instructions for hide icons that could reveal that pcTattletale was running on the victim’s cell phone.
A search by Ars Technnica of archived versions of the pcTattletale website on the Wayback Machine shows that, by 2022, pcTattletale had added numerous calls about “cheating” on the website and featured multiple blog posts about ways to “catch your boyfriend cheating“.
These explicitly directed people to use the “unlock code from your boyfriend’s cell phone” to install “the pcTattletale spy app” in order to “see everything he does on his cell phone“.
Around this time, federal investigators in California had launched a investigation into “stalkerware”and pcTattletale was among its targets. Fleming was surprisingly easy to find, and investigators quickly obtained copies of his email account.
Fleming’s email contained many technical support messages of the kind “furthermore, if there is a way to NOT let the user know that you are taking a screenshot, that would also be helpful”, and answers to problems such as “my husband knows when a screenshot is being taken because it beeps. He now suspects there is something on his cell phone.”
Despite being told repeatedly that people were using their product to spy on others without their consent, Fleming helped them with technical support.
A government investigator even opened an affiliate marketing account for pcTattletale, and Fleming reached out to offer ready-made banner ads with text like “pcTattletale Cheating Husband? #1 to Catch a Traitor” and “The Best Spy App to Catch a Traitor”.
Fleming even stated, in a message, that pcTattletale was more successful when marketed to womenbecause “there are many more women who want to catch their man than the other way around”.
Based on this data, the federal government obtained a 2022 search warrant and raided the Bruce Township home where Fleming lived.
Federal prosecutors ended up accusing Fleming of selling a product “knowing or having reason to know” that the program was “primarily used for the purpose of surreptitious interception of communications cable, oral or electronic”.
This week in California, Fleming pleaded guilty of the charge and was released on bail while awaits the sentence.
Mass Fleming’s fall from grace it actually started in 2024. According to what was reported at the time, pcTattletale had been hacked and much of its data had been stolen.
Apparently, hackers had obtained access to private keys from your Amazon account where the video data was stored created by the application. Fleming stated at the time that his company was “out of business and completely finished” after the breach.
There is now one less stalkerware tool on the market. Unfortunately, many others continue to offer their services, and their owners and operators are often harder to catch than the seemingly naïve Bryan Fleming.
