Spy phone apps that others use to monitor you.. How to detect them to protect your privacy ?

 Spy phone apps that others use to monitor you

mSpy is an app built on the idea that knowing is always better than hoping. Loaded with features, it gives you a clear picture of the user’s digital world. With advanced GPS tracking, you’ll know where they are at all times. With detailed call monitoring, you’ll know who they’re calling and who they’re calling. And with social media monitoring – including Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Snapchat – you’ll know what they’re saying and who they’re saying it to. Simply install mSpy on a target device and you’ll have advanced spy metrics at your fingertips, plus all the insight you need to make informed decisions.

Cerberus is a phone tracking app for personal use. That’s right — it monitors your phone instead of someone else’s. It helps you find a lost or stolen smartphone and has a bunch of extra features. These include taking photos of the potential thief, SMS commands, finding the phone on a map, and you can lock and wipe your data. It won’t help you track other people’s devices, but you can absolutely spy on who stole yours. The subscription service starts at a very reasonable $5 per year for one device and expands from there.

FlexiSpy is one of the most powerful spy apps on Android. Of course, that means you have to be very careful with its fancy features. It lets you do the kinds of things that people might be afraid of, including turning on the microphone to listen in on your device’s surroundings, monitoring chat apps, remotely capturing your camera, recording your keyboard, and the ability to completely hide itself from antivirus apps and your app drawer. The price is pretty high and you can’t get this app on the Play Store, but it has a lot of features.

Google Family Link is an app for parents to track kids through their Google accounts. The app lets you view activity on your child’s device, manage apps, and even recommend apps. You can also set device limits and lock the device if needed. Family Link replaced an older Google service, so not all of the features were perfect at launch. Some people have experienced connectivity issues and glitches, but overall, the experience should work fine for most people. Best of all, it’s a free option.

Find My Device Google’s Find My Device app is probably the best lost or stolen phone app for Android. You can quickly see your phone or other Google accessories on a map with their exact location. Additionally, you can erase the phone, ring it, or lock (lock) the device as desired. However, you can’t take photos or anything like you can with Cerberus. Overall, it’s a straightforward and simple way to track where your phone is at all times.

Prey Anti Theft is another find my device app. This one is completely free and has some decent features. They include the usual array of find my phone features like GPS tracking, phone locking, and sending out alerts via the phone. However, Prey can also take pictures with the camera, identify nearby Wi-Fi hotspots, and track things like the device’s MAC address. That’s not a bad set of features when you get it for free.

Spyera is one of the most powerful spy apps for Android. It has simple features for people like parents. However, we can’t imagine a use case where something this extensive would be necessary outside of enterprise use. It has a bunch of features, including the ability to hide itself from everywhere. It also comes with remote control support, SMS spoofing, and all sorts of other known suspicious behavior. It’s quite expensive so we wouldn’t recommend this to regular people. It’s also not available on Google Play, so you’ll have to download and sideload the app from its official website.

Carrier Family Locators are family location services offered by carriers like T-Mobile, Verizon, and others. These services work about as expected. You can track the phone location of any phone on your plan. They typically feature things like on-demand location, alerts of various kinds, and work on most devices. We have T-Mobile links here, but you can search the Play Store or contact your carrier to see if they have a similar service.

Many phone manufacturers have Find My Phone services as part of their software experience. One notable example is Samsung. You sign in with your Samsung account and can find your device through its service. It runs alongside Google’s Find My Device service to give it a powerful punch. You can lock (or unlock) your phone, find it on a map, and there are other features too. It’s worth looking around to see if your phone has something like this.

XNSPY is a bit of an oddity. It has all those creepy features like call log monitoring, GPS tracking, web browsing monitoring, chat access, and all sorts of other tracking stuff. However, it’s more affordable than most of its big competitors like FlexiSpy and Spyera. The basic version lets you take a look at a few things while the premium version lets you take a look at everything. This is a good option for businesses or families with some money to spend, but families may want to try Google Family Link or Kiddie Parental Controls before something more powerful like this.

GlassWire GlassWire  allows you to monitor the data on your device. You can easily see when a spy app is sending data to its host. We recommend this first because spy apps can hide from task managers and antivirus apps, but they cannot hide their data usage.

You can find uninstallation guides for most major spy apps. For example, here’s one for FlexiSpy, and here’s one for mSpy.

As a temporary solution, you can put your phone in airplane mode. Spy apps rely on being able to send data back to the host and they can’t do that if you’re not connected to any networks.

If all else fails, you can factory reset your phone. This should remove every app other than the ones pre-installed by the OEM.