A Preventive Win for Survivor Safety: FTC Denies SpyFone Petition

A keyboard with black keys, with one red key with a shadowy person wearing a spy hat. nnedv logo top right. text at bottom reads, “A Preventive Win for survivor safety: FTC Denies Spyfone petition.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) issued a powerful decision: it denied SpyFone CEO Scott Zuckerman’s request to vacate or weaken the FTC’s 2021 consent order banning him from the surveillance business. That original order, one of the strongest enforcement actions ever taken against a stalkerware company to date, remains fully intact. For survivors, advocates, and everyone who cares about privacy and safety, this is a meaningful victory.

It is also a significant moment for the Safety Net Project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV). In its order denying the petition, the FTC repeatedly cited NNEDV’s submission urging it to maintain the ban in full. It relied on our analysis and echoed our core point: when a business model is built on secret surveillance and privacy violations, meaningful accountability protects survivors, and all consumers, from serious harm.

Much of Safety Net’s work is necessarily reactive: each day, we support survivors and advocates responding to technology-facilitated abuse, typically after harm has already occurred. But some of our most impactful work is preventive: stopping abuse before it happens by shaping policy, supporting safety-by-design efforts, and – in this case – clarifying that products built on unlawful surveillance and privacy violations are not legitimate offerings in a competitive marketplace. This case is a clear example of prevention in action. By keeping the SpyFone order in place, the FTC has helped ensure that fewer survivors will ever have to discover that their phones were turned into tracking devices, their messages read in real time, or their location data quietly exposed to someone intent on controlling or harming them.

The Commission’s decision makes clear that nothing about the passage of time justified setting this order aside: stalkerware remains a pervasive threat, and it has only become more prevalent in the time since the FTC’s 2021 order. Echoing Safety Net’s comment, the FTC emphasized the deterrent value of the order for an entire ecosystem of companies that might otherwise see nonconsensual intimate surveillance as a viable business opportunity.

We applaud the FTC for prioritizing the safety and privacy of survivors and all consumers, and for reaffirming that accountability for tech-facilitated abuse does not simply fade with the passage of time. This decision sends a clear message: products designed to facilitate coercive control and stalking have no legitimate place in the marketplace. For survivors, that means one less avenue for abuse, and for Safety Net, it’s a heartening reminder that prevention, when taken seriously, can be lifesaving.

We encourage you to read our full comment here.