How Eva Galperin, who leads EFF's Threat Lab, is advocating for people affected by stalkerware, which gives a bad actor full access to another's device
OVER THE LAST year, Eva Galperin says she's learned the signs: the survivors of domestic abuse who come to her describing how their tormentors seem … Tweets: @evacide , @eff , @leakissner , and @a_greenberg Tweets: Eva / @evacide : That time I got really mad and decided to kill an industry. http://www.wired.com/... @eff : A year ago, EFF's @evacide began a fight against “stalkerware” with a massive project: assisting hundreds of domestic abuse victims afraid their devices might be hacked. Now she's taking the fight directly to the makers of the spyware, and she's winning. http://www.wired.com/... Lea Kissner / @leakissner : 1 in 4 women and 1 in 9 men are severely abused by a partner. This is common and when you design a product, you should be taking into account the needs of these users. http://twitter.com/... Andy Greenberg / @a_greenberg : Eva Galperin, the head of EFF's Threat Lab, has been pressuring antivirus firms to finally take seriously the threat of consumer spyware apps used for domestic abuse. Today, she got her first win: Kaspersky announced a new stalkerware crackdown: http://www.wired.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Eva Galperin's campaign did not start from nothing: Motherboard had already profiled the consumer spyware trade in 2017 with Retina-X and FlexiSpy, and The Citizen Lab's technical assessment of stalkerware apps documented how invasive these tools are and how openly they are marketed to abusive partners. What changed with Galperin is the target: rather than only helping victims, EFF's Threat Lab began going after the industry itself — she describes it as deciding to 'kill an industry.'
The stakes extend beyond phones. Reporting on how abusers use smart locks, security cameras, and lighting to spy on victims frames stalkerware as one layer of a broader domestic-surveillance problem, and Galperin's pressure on antivirus vendors is what turned detection of these apps from a niche issue into an industry-wide one.
First-order effects
- Hundreds of domestic abuse survivors now have a direct channel to EFF's Threat Lab for help determining whether their devices are compromised, shifting the burden of detection from victims to a funded advocacy operation.
- Antivirus vendors face public pressure from Galperin to stop treating consumer stalkerware as out of scope — a named adversary with a platform, not an abstract complaint.
Second-order effects
- The pressure campaign produced the Coalition Against Stalkerware, with Avira, Kaspersky, and the EFF among its founding members — a formal industry structure for flagging and detecting these apps.
- Spyware vendors in the mold of Retina-X and FlexiSpy face a shrinking market as the major consumer security products they once evaded begin actively classifying and blocking their tools.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points toward stalkerware being treated as a consumer-safety category rather than a gray-market product — with policy following, as seen in later calls for US legislation making it easier for victims to leave family phone plans that abusers exploit.
- If the coalition model holds, detection of intimate-partner surveillance becomes table stakes for antivirus firms, structurally separating legitimate device-monitoring products from those that conceal themselves — and pushing the industry toward the broader ecosystem cyber defense posture the EFF campaign exemplifies.
The trend: Consumer spyware is being forced out of the gray market by an alliance of digital-rights advocates and antivirus vendors, with stalkerware becoming a named threat category rather than an overlooked one.