What is stalkerware, and why Quiles isn't

The Coalition Against Stalkerware, formed by the EFF, Avast, Kaspersky and around a dozen vendors and NGOs, defines stalkerware as software designed to let a third party covertly surveil another person, often in contexts of domestic violence, harassment, or coercive control. Typical functions are message reading, call recording, screen capture, continuous geolocation, and hidden operation.

The legal and technical distinction with responsible parental control rests on three axes: consent of the monitored person, age of that person, and visibility of the software.

Since 2020, Google Play has explicitly prohibited apps that track a user without their consent. The policy reserves a narrow exception: apps whose purpose is parental supervision or enterprise management, provided that:

• The legitimate purpose is declared clearly and obviously.
• The app does not present itself as something else.
• It does not use the isMonitoringTool attribute to evade the operating system's protections.
• It persistently notifies the monitored user.

Apps that qualify for that exception must declare, in the Android manifest's <application> element, the android:isMonitoringTool attribute set to true and, via meta-data, specify who is monitored. Accepted values are parental_control, enterprise_management, and in more recent versions, separating the subtype of the monitored user.

The line is reasonably sharp. Responsible parental control: a minor, a parent or guardian with parental responsibility, a protective and proportionate purpose, visible monitoring, minimum necessary data. Any step outside that lands in grey area or in outright prohibited territory.

Common ways a product crosses the line: installing the app on an adult's phone without consent, hiding the icon or disguising it as a calculator, reading messages in end-to-end-encrypted apps, recording ambient audio, transmitting screenshots to a remote panel without notice, keeping the app running even when the device owner tries to uninstall it.

Quiles does none of that. The choice is not just compliance-driven: the threat model "someone installs this on my phone without me knowing" is exactly what the architecture is designed to make impossible.

Any parental-control system, including ours, can be misused if an adult installs it on another adult's phone. That installation, without consent of the monitored person, is stalkerware regardless of the product used. Quiles is not designed for that use case, and the brand rejects it.

If you recognise this in your own situation, someone controls your phone and you fear for your safety, the Coalition Against Stalkerware maintains resources at stopstalkerware.org. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is reachable at 1-800-799-7233. In the UK, the National Domestic Abuse Helpline is 0808 2000 247.

For everyone else: install Quiles on your minor child's phone, explain what it does, and leave the notification visible. That is the difference.