As for the email account, I took into consideration that most of the average users only know they have the ability for one email account. So installing it in the background is quite easy and it never receives mail to give off alerts. A perfect stalking tool. Where as you would see other items on devices like Blackberry and Android that can have apps running all the time.

I was more concerned with people putting this on someones elses phone than on their own.

Firstly, thanks for the well-written article. Your analysis on our differentiation from other players in this space was fairly spot on, although I note you didn't mention Latitude on the Android platform which has a similar technology.

I believe you misunderstand an important point – our background tracking system is both obvious to the user, and requires an explicit opt-in.

If you ever switch from one email account to another on your iPhone or iPod Touch, it's impossible to miss – you will have another email account there called “Stalqer offline location”. We do not hijack existing mail accounts or connections, indeed there is no way to do so.

Some people are fine with broadcasting their every move to the world, some restrict it to a small group of friends, and some prefer complete privacy. We deliberately chose the name “Stalqer” to empower users to make an intelligent choice about exactly the privacy concerns you raise.

Regards
Mick Johnson
CEO
Stalqer

Stalqer is a troll, not a real functioning app. They are trying to focus attention on privacy/creepiness issues (1.5 even adds 'playback' of location) to divert attention from the fact that (a) almost no-one uses it and (b) those who do, don't like it (see app ratings, which are abysmal) and (c) it just plain isn't going to work at a technical level.

Stick a fork in it, it's done.

Your iPhone cannot run the Stalqer application and retrieve GPS information on a background timer, even via this email thing.

Instead, they get your IP address from the connection you make to their servers, then use that information to determine which cell phone tower zone you're in (via which gateways your packets travel through). Thus, they can get your location in a fairly wide area based on your IP, but it's limited to that. They can't get real pinpoint info unless you launch the application yourself.