Yes..
It should be illegal to install spyware on phones, desktop computers, or just about any electronic device.
That includes you guv!
Stop trying to put spyware and crap on my devices El Presidente!
Plaid Cymru MP Liz Saville Roberts has tabled a series of amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill which, among other things, could make it illegal to install spyware on someone's phone. Roberts, MP for Dwyfor Meirionnydd* in Wales, is concerned about how new tech and platforms can be misused. Speaking to The Register, she …
"Then remove Chrome, if you're using it.... uninstall Android from any phone of yours... and don't install Windows 10, if it's not too late..."
I use SeaMonkey as my web browser and email client.
I currently do not have an Android device (mine bricked itself a couple of months ago and I couldn't unbrick it :-/ - just turned it on and poof encryption failed or some other crap..) not got around to buying a new one yet, back on an old Nokia for now (Pre-Smartphone Nokia!))
I use GNU/Linux Fedora 23 and I have not had Windows installed at all on any of my PCs since 2006 (I started using Linux in 2003 however).
My emails are hosted on my own personal dedicated server which I setup and configured.
How'd I do?
It is. Computer Misuse Act:
"A person is guilty of an offence if—
(a)he causes a computer to perform any function with intent to secure access to any program or *data* held in any computer"
Unless that's one of the provisions that never got implemented.
All we need is a Police force prepared to investigate and the CPS to prosecute. Adding more laws won't change the fact that the Police and CPS are too scared to go after, for example, Google and Microsoft.
The current heap of confusing and possibly contradictory laws is hard for police forces to implement. Instead of doing something useful like issuing guidelines on implementation, lets add several more poorly thought-out laws to the top of the heap and hope the whole thing doesn't come crashing down.
> let's add several more poorly thought-out laws to the top of the heap and hope the whole thing doesn't come crashing down.
Too late, I'm afraid, it's already happened. (The "add several", "poorly thought-out", and "hope", that is. Not the "crashing down" part, yet.)
Sometimes I think legislators and lawyers don't even realise that Goedel's theorem implies you can't close all the loopholes. So we end up (to use a maritime analogy) with barnacles encrusted upon barnacles, while the hull has long since rotted away.
The police love new, badly thought-out laws, because they can be twisted so easily to target activities that they were never intended to cover, while usually being far too difficult to find out who is carrying out the activities that the law was actually designed to prevent.
So while the pervert will be careful to cover his tracks after loading some malware onto someone's laptop so that it streams its webcam to him, the concerned relative who puts a spycam in a room at a care home to see who is abusing or stealing from their elderly mother will get serious jail time.
No argument starting "The Police Police love" is likely to be accurate. In general most rank and file work to a "are they doing a bad thing and if so is it illegal" mindset. Some don't, some apply the law as rigidly as they can, but they are a tiny minority.
Police management layers have targets set by politicians and they will look, or even ask for new, laws.
And then you get wierdness introduced by judges "hard cases make bad law" like viewing images being equivalent to creating them or plastic toy swords being knives because they have blades.
"outlaw the taking of “multiple [two or more] images of an individual unless it is in the public interest to do so”"
The way to get a good photo of someone is to take lots of photos and delete the duff ones. This applied even with film cameras. With digital photos it's ridiculous to only take a single photo of a subject.
People working with a view camera, or Cartier-Bresson, may not agree with you. It was the fashion photographer of the 1970s who started to shoot like a mad to take a single good image - especially when motorized film winders became available.
Others just learn when it's the right time to release the shutter - even with a digital camera. It also makes you more "stealthy".
Anyway, even a single photo can be use for harassment or other unlawful purposes.
That's fine if you are a top professional photographer who spends their career developing that skill.
The enormous majority of photos are taken by amateur photographers, or by people with a camera on their mobile who don't even consider themselves any kind of photographer.
They don't conceivably have time or need to develop that kind of expertise. Why should they?
Do you really think that even a top expert can stroll out and get a perfect shot every time?
I would have thought the strange provisions about photography were the bigger story here.
Why is El Reg leading with "spyware"? Is that proposal (already covered, incidentally, by a law that's been on the statute books these 26 years) really more newsworthy than a law that forbids taking two or more pictures of someone without their express consent?
One of my son's friends had their iPhone stolen, but they were, with the Help of the "Find My iPhone" app, Blyton-esque, able to track it down and get the Police to arrest the perpetrators.
Would be a different matter if Apple had decided to call the app "Find My Cheating Partner" instead.