Technology

A bold mission by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) to Mars& two moons, including a lander component for one of them, is all set to enter the development phase after the plan was submitted to the Japanese governmentscience ministry this week.

Dubbed the &Martian Moons Exploration& (MMX) mission, the goal is to launch the probe in 2024, using the new H-3 rocket being developed by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, which is expected to launch for the first time sometime later in 2020. The probe will survey and observe both Phobos and Deimos, the two moons that orbit the Red Planet, which are both smaller and more irregularly shaped than EarthMoon.

The MMX lander will park on Phobos, while the probe studies the two space-based bodies from a distance. This is the first-ever mission that seeks to land a spacecraft on one of the moons of Mars, and it&ll include a rover that is being developed by JAXA in partnership with teams at German space agency DLR and French space agency CNES.

The mission will include an ambitious plan to actually collect a sample of the surface of Phobos and return it to Earth for study — which will mean a round-trip for the MMX spacecraft that should see it make its terrestrial return by 2029.

NASA is also planning a Mars-sample return mission, which would aim to bring back a sample from the Red Planet itself using the Mars 2020 six-wheel rover that itplanning to launch later this year.

Both of these missions could be crucial stepping stones for eventual human exploration and colonization of Mars. Itpossible that Phobos could act as an eventual staging ground for Mars missions, as its lower gravity makes it an easier body from which to depart for eventual astronauts. And Mars is obviously the ultimate goal for NASAArtemis program, which seeks to first establish a more permanent human scientific presence on the Moon before heading to the Red Planet.

WarnerMedia and YouTube TV today announced a distribution deal that will bring HBO and Cinemax to the Google-owned live TV streaming service for the first time as well as, notably, WarnerMedianew service HBO Max, set to launch this spring.

That means that YouTube TV customers will have the option to add-on either HBO or Cinemax to their current subscription, as they can today on other streaming services like Hulu. Alternately, they&ll be able to opt for HBO Maxexpanded streaming service instead.

The new agreement will also allow YouTube TV to continue to carry the WarnerMedia networks TBS, TNT, truTV, CNN, HLN, Turner Classic Movies, Adult Swim and Cartoon Network, which have been available to YouTube TV since 2018.

&As consumers& media consumption habits continually evolve and the landscape becomes more and more dynamic, our goal remains constant, and that is to make the portfolio of WarnerMedia networks available as widely as possible,& said Rich Warren, president of WarnerMedia Distribution, in a statement. &YouTube has been a valued partner for a number of years, and we&re pleased to not only extend our existing agreement, but also make HBO and Cinemax & and soon HBO Max & available to YouTube TV customers for the first time.&

HBO Max is WarnerMediapreviously announced direct-to-consumer streaming service, which includes the HBO library as well as films from Warner Bros., third-party licensed programs and 31 Max Originals. Combined with HBO series, HBO Max will stream 69 originals in its first year.

Among these is a &Gossip Girl& sequel, a Mindy Kaling comedy called &College Girls,& an adaptation of the popular novel &Circe,& a superhero series &DC Superhero High,& a &Dune& series, a &Grease& reboot, a reboot of &The Boondocks,& &The Green Lantern,& an Issa Rae comedy, a Ridley Scott sci-fi series, a new documentary on Anthony Bourdain, adocumentary about Amy Schumer,a Melissa McCarthy comedy film,a documentary with Monica Lewinskyand other scripted and unscripted shows. It also has a new deal with J.J. Abrams& Bad Robot and anoverall deal with Lisa Ling.

The company says the service will debut in May with 10,000 hours of film and TV, but will continue to grow over time. It is set to cost $14.99 per month.

With the additions of HBO, YouTube TV viewers can gain access to shows like &Watchmen,& &Big Little Lies,& &Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,& &Succession,& &Westworld,& &The Outsider,& &Barry,& &Insecure,& and &Curb Your Enthusiasm,& as well as classics like &Game of Thrones,& &The Sopranos,& &The Wire& and &Sex and the City.& Upcoming HBO releases will include &High Maintenance,& &My Brilliant Friend,& &The Plot Against America,& &The Undoing& and &I Know This Much Is True.&

Meanwhile, Cinemax brings its own slate of originals, including &Strike Back,& &Trackers& and &Gangs of London,& as well as movies like &Boy Erased,& &First Man& and &Bad Times at the El Royale.&

While HBO and Cinemax are offered to cord-cutters as over-the-top subscriptions in a number of places, WarnerMediadistribution plans for HBO Max are only now starting to be revealed. It makes sense that WarnerMedia would look to grow its distribution partnerships in the wake of the increased streaming competition arriving this year, including NBCUPeacock and an expanded CBS All Access, announced today by ViacomCBS.

Like most investors, I am a little too obsessed with unicorns.

But not just the Silicon Valley kind. As the mother of a five-year-old daughter, my interests also veer in a pink, sparkly direction. So it should not be all that surprising that I recently found myself in a dusty corner of the internet where die-hard unicorn fans go to spread their wings.

It was there, deep in the My Little Pony forums, that one question stopped me in my tracks: &is a male alicorn possible in the future?¹&

An alicorn, for those uninitiated to the mythological particulars, is the rare winged, female version of a traditional unicorn.

My Little Pony popularized the term, and the fan forum on which user &Green Precision& asked his question back in 2015 had some interesting answers to the particulars of this philosophical dilemma.

Shadow Stallion responded immediately, &I don&t think a male Alicorn will be possible in the future. Not because its [sic] not wanted or because its [sic] not genetically possible…but generally when male characters are introduced to a show where female characters are prominent, things get ugly.&

Malinter posited, &they probably do but given the female-to-male ratio of Equestria² they are probably exceptionally rare. The real problem for a male alicorn is not that they exist but where is their place in the world? …Our male alicorn has some pretty big hoof prints to fill in while at the same time not make a trainwreck of established lore.&

Wind Chaser went straight from unconscious bias to conscious bias in their response: &aesthetically a male alicorn just wouldn&t look right, because their bodies are already naturally larger than females, thus the wings would cause an imbalance to the design.&

But it wasn&t all bad news.

&Until itproven otherwise, itsafe to say that something like a male alicorn is possible,& responded Geek0zoid. Crysahis agreed. &Overall yes, I believe there could be a male alicorn it may just take a while to actually happen!&

It doesn&t take a PhD in philosophy from Stanford or the one lone female investing partner at Sequoia³ to posit that these same conversations were probably happening all over Sandhill Road in December of 2009, as male VCs discussed whether female unicorns could actually happen⁴.

As we move into 2020, though, we&re about to see a pink, winged stampede.

Just look at the recent trends. In 2019, more female-funded unicorns were born than ever before.⁵And things are only looking up. (I&m looking at you, ClassPass!)

Public opinion agrees. Alongside TruePublic, where I am an advisor and angel investor, I ran a study asking if people believed we would see more female-led unicorns in the 2020s.⁶ At the time of this article, 68% of the 6,500 respondents said they believed we would see more, with 30% of women responding &many more& (as opposed to only 16% of men). Only 4% of women, but 9% of men, responded &no, not a chance.&⁷

Kaben Clauson, founder and CEO, says &to represent Gen Z, Millennials and Gen X, TruePublic needs a weighted sample of roughly one thousand Americans to represent that population of the USA.& This particular study already has 6,500 respondents, making it statistically significant.

In fact, female-founded and female co-founded companies are actually over-indexing for unicorn status despite a lack of investment dollars.

Shelby Porges, co-founder of The Billion Dollar Fund for Women, explains: &Recent tracking has shown that female-founded companies represent 4% of all unicorns. Thatastonishing considering that in the past couple of years, they have gotten only slightly more than 2% of all venture funding.& Porges, whose group has mobilized more than 80 venture funds to pledge to invest over a billion dollars into women-founded companies, continues, &It demonstrates why we say, ‘when you invest in women, you&re in good company.& &

Here are the three reasons I believe a herd of winged female unicorns (OK, alicorns) is coming down the pipeline in the 2020s:

1. Women invest in women at 3x the rate of men

New data reveals that women invest in women at nearly three times the rate that men do and with the (slow) rise in the number of female investing partners at VCV firms, we are poised to see more and more gender-balanced founding teams getting funding.⁸ Like one male GP at one of the worldtop VC funds said to me when discussing one of the few female partners at his firm, &she always brings us parenting companies.& It might be cringe-worthy if TechCrunch hadn&t declared 2020 &a big year for online childcare& and that same female partner weren&t about to make a big chunk of cash thanks to all the upcoming parenting alicorns she was smartly funding.

Sophia Bendz, a partner at Atomico who also leads the Atomico Angel Program, said, &I&m confident we&ll see more female unicorns in the next decade because therea growing wave of ambitious female founders building incredible products and services. There are also more women in VC now and I&ve seen first-hand the impact having female investment partners can have on increasing the amount of investment into female-led companies. The data shows that women invest in women at three times the rate as male investment partners.&

My study at TruePublic coincided with these findings. When asked if a female investor was more likely to invest in a female entrepreneur, 64% of people responded affirmatively (64% of these individuals were women and 63% were men).⁹

Jomayra Herrera agrees. An investor at Cowboy Ventures (which thanks to Aileen Lee coined the term &unicorn& in the first place), and a volunteer with AllRaise, a nonprofit promoting women in VC, she says: &As the venture industry continues to diversify, especially as it relates to gender and race/ethnicity, I am optimistic that we will see more female-led and people of color-led unicorns over the next decade. We know that diverse teams not only function better, but they are able to see areas of opportunities that more homogenous teams might miss. I think the next generation of investors are more likely to question conventional wisdom, forms of pattern recognition that may lead to bias, and other structural barriers that have historically left out promising entrepreneurs.&

Camila Farani is a well-known investor in Brazil. As founder of G2 Capital, former president of Gavea Angels and a personality on Brazil&Shark Tank,& she says &having diverse points of view at the table makes the decision clearer and more certain. People who think differently than you and have other visions of the market, sometimes can show you what you can&t see by yourself.&

She also reminds us not to forget the impact that angel investors can have. &The investments market is still made up mostly of men, but this landscape is changing gradually. It is interesting to see that angel investing is being the most common choice for women who want to make their first investments.&

This trend of investing more in women isn&t just limited to female investors. Susana Robles has spent two decades leading the charge to invest in women in Latin America and alongside Marta Cruz of NXTP Labs is co-founder of WeXchange, a platform that connects women entrepreneurs from Latin America and the Caribbean with mentors and investors.

As Robles says, &I think the world is finally waking up to the fact that there is serious research proving that startups with women co-founders win in all aspects: profitability, as well as greater social and environmental awareness. Investors should want to have this triple win.& She continues, &women tend to return money to investors faster than men, and at the same time, they obtain higher returns. Women are in charge of 64% of all global purchasing decisions on products and services, so having women on C-level positions increases the chance that a startup [will] be highly attractive to a massive market and become a unicorn.&

It also extends to the LPs in the funds. &I also think many investors in funds (mostly DFIs [development finance institutions] but not exclusively) have become more vocal in stating that they don&t want any more to invest in teams led by an all-white, all-male cast who choose startups with all-white, all-male founders.& Jennifer Neundorfer is the co-founder of Jane VC and an investor in Kinside, a parenting app that just raised a $3 million seed round. When describing her fundrationale for focusing on female founders, she drops the mic: &we&re going to invest in an under-looked asset class that is overperforming.& Boom.

2. Female founders are creating new billion-dollar markets

Another reason we&ll see more female-founded &alicorns& in the 2020s has everything to do with the new markets that female founders are creating. Hunter Walk of Homebrew was one of the initial seed investors in Winnie, an online marketplace for childcare that recently raised a $9 million Series A. At the time, he saw something that others investors didn&t. Winnie co-founder Sara Mauskopf explains, &Four years ago when we started Winnie, parenting and especially child care were not hot investment areas. This has been changing. It certainly helps that more investors are women and are in the thick of their child-bearing and rearing years.&

Part of what Walk says he recognized was the clear founder-market fit displayed by Mauskopf and her co-founder Annie Halsall. As Mauskopf says, &With Winnie, we saw an opportunity to solve the child-care crisis that other founders either did not recognize or did not care to solve. While everyone else was starting crypto and scooter companies, we were building the first-ever tech platform for $57 billion child care industry. Lack of access to quality child care disproportionately impacts women, so it shouldn&t be surprising that it took a female led team to capitalize on this opportunity.& Expanding on the concept of founder-market fit, Walk says, &I love to come away thinking, these are the absolute right founders to build this business.&¹⁰

Bendz, the Atomico partner who specializes in femtech and is also an avid angel investor, agrees. &Often I meet founders that you can tell are at the right place at the right time with the right mindset and the right team. Italmost like all of the experiences they have had prior to launching a company have been preparing them to create that business at that time. These are the kind of founders who I know are in it for the long haul, and who are going to weather the ups and downs.& As a woman who uses the products and services she invests in, Bendz is also an example of investor-market fit, which I believe will open new markets in the decades to come.

Something else investors like Walk and Bendz believe in? Outsized opportunities. And the potential for outsized opportunities are especially ripe in untapped markets. The rise of femtech is yet another example of how the intuitive success of the concept of founder-market fit ultimately needed more female founders for certain markets to blossom. As Bendz explains, &Throughout a womanlife there are many big events that have a big impact on our overall health — from childbirth to menopause. I know all women are tired of poor or non-existent solutions for women surrounding those life events, and thatwhy we are seeing so many companies launching to better serve womenneeds. When you think about the fact that women have only had the right to vote and educate themselves for 100 years, itmind-blowing how long the world was operating with only 50% of the population in control. Thatreflected in the products and services we as a society have funded.&

Womenconsumer products are another area. Ornella Moraes is one of four female co-founders of Brazilian-led Sousmile, which recently raised a $6 million USD Series A led by Kaszek Ventures. &Our brand is a woman,& Moraes says of her dental beauty startup that retails throughout São Paulo. And so are the leaders of the company. At Sousmile, there are four female co-founders and two male co-founders. &More dentists in the world are women than men, so itbeen critical for our team to have more female founders,& she says. In this way, the rise of female founders and co-founders can completely change markets. &We believe this will fundamentally create a different type of product,& says Walk.

3. Emerging markets will take the lead

Finally, certain emerging markets pose a particular opportunity for female founders by over-indexing for both large IPOs and female founders. 2017 was the first year that more of the largest IPOs in the internet sector globally came from emerging markets. Nazar Yasin, founder of Rise Capital, which invests in emerging markets, says &This trend isn&t going away.& After all, most GDP growth comes from emerging markets, where most global internet users live. As he explains, &the future of market capitalization growth in the internet sector globally belongs to emerging markets.& And yet this type of innovation takes resilience. &If you&re a startup in one of these markets, itlike trying to grow a plant in the desert.&¹¹ In an environment that demands more daily resilience, there is a different appetite for risk and innovation. (I call this resilience innovation.)

Perhaps the easiest example of emerging market innovation fueled by resilience is fintech. Emerging markets and their often unstable economies boast a much higher number of frustratingly unbanked individuals. This brings about innovation. Hanna Schiuma, the Brazilian-born fintech founder of ElasBank, where I am an angel investor and advisor, explains how ubiquitous such fintech innovation is becoming.

&Soon all finance will be tailor-made and fintech will be common ground because all financial services will be technology-intensive.& She also argues that the nature of such an innovation allows the industry to become more innovative, and thus inclusive, which is exactly what is happening with her own womenbank, launching in 2020. &That means great opportunities to better serve womenfinancial needs to offer dedicated products, and to gather female talent to build those products from a diverse and innovative perspective.& Ultimately, &resilience is key for us to build that pool of talent and open the doors for gender balance and financial inclusion.&

Furthermore, data shows Africa and Latin America both beat global averages for percentages of startup female founders. Laura Stebbing is co-CEO of accelerateHER, a global community of leaders addressing the under-representation of women in tech through action. Raised in Southern Africa, Stebbing is passionate about Africarise as a hub of female entrepreneurship.

&Africa has both the highest proportion of women founders at 26% [Latam comes in second]¹²and a $42 billion funding gap. Thereclearly no lack of talent across Africa54 countries, so for the investors, corporate executives, policy makers and established founders that aren&t moved by the moral arguments for gender parity, notice the enormous business opportunity. We will start to see a higher volume of resilient, scalable companies emerge as leaders build more diverse networks and ecosystems that support women to unlock their entrepreneurial potential.& Nathan Lustig, founder of Magma Partners, a VC firm in Latin America which invests in female founders above the regional average, explains, &investing in and empowering resilient women entrepreneurs is just good business, and is one of the biggest investment opportunities, especially in emerging markets.&

I believe Latin American can have an edge. I am a Silicon Valley-born investor now living in &Silicon Aires,& where I have been thrilled to see exciting numbers of female founders in Latin America. Susana Robles agrees, and says the reason is in part due to the nature of a committed ecosystem to support one another. &Itthe sheer need that forces you to collaborate.& An ecosystem like Silicon Valley doesn&t have the same need to do so. Of Latin America, Robles says, &In 10 years, we will have created a much more collaborative market than the developed ones.& And that collaboration is leading to great female founders. 2019, in fact, saw more funding going to female co-founders in Latin America than in Europe or the USA.¹³

This will lead to future alicorns. Ann Williams, COO of Creditas, a Brazilian fintech currently closing in on its own unicorn status, says &the conversion funnel for unicorns works just like any other selection process. We fill the top with a bunch of great women in supporting roles in emerging market startups, these women take their experiences and found rocking new companies. A percentage of these will convert to scaleups raising Series C and D rounds with valuations at $1 billion or higher. And voila! we get women-led unicorns.& She continues, &the odds are with us and I am sure the talent is too!&

Juliane Butty, startup head at Platzi and former regional manager of Seedstars, one of the leading accelerators and investors fostering female entrepreneurship in emerging markets, joins Williams. &We have definitely seen the rise of female founders and investors in emerging markets in the last decade. One supports the other. And we know that success breeds success.&

Perhaps My Little Pony fan Malinter said it best when he suggested how a male version of the alicorn could finally emerge in such a female-dominated space: &The simplest way they could probably add one in would be to make said alicorn the ruler of a neighboring nation.& In the same way, emerging markets may just hold the key for female unicorns.

No matter the region, Robles says &if we keep opening doors to women entrepreneurs who are as ambitious as men in growing their companies, we&ll begin to see many more unicorns with gender diversified teams.& Hanna Schiuma, the Elasbank founder who just might be building the next female-founded unicorn, agrees. &The alicorns are coming. And we&re ready to fly.&

²Equestria is of course where the My Little Ponies and their assorted unicorns, alicorns and friends all live.³Go Jess Lee!⁴Yes, Aileen Lee of Cowboy VC first invented the term in her 2013 TechCrunch piece, but we&re in a unicorn-fueled time machine, people.⁸&Do Female Investors Support Female Entrepreneurs? An Empirical Analysis of Angel Investor Behavior,& Seth C. Oranburg, Duquesne University School of Law, Pittsburgh PA, USA and Mark Geiger, Duquesne University School of Business, Pittsburgh PA, USA¹²Forthcoming research from TechCrunch/Crunchbase¹³Forthcoming research from TechCrunch/Crunchbase

We reported today on KidsGuard, a powerful mobile spyware. Not only is the app secretly installed on thousands of Android phones without the owners& consent, it also left a server open and unprotected, exposing the data it siphoned off from victims& infected devices to the internet.

This consumer-grade spyware also goes by &stalkerware.& Itoften used by parents to monitor their kids, but all too frequently itrepurposed for spying on a spouse without their knowledge or consent. These spying apps are banned from Apple and Googleapp stores, but those bans have done little to curb the spread of these privacy invading apps, which can read a victimmessages, listen to their phone calls, track their real-time locations and steal their contacts, photos, videos and anything else on their phones.

Stalkerware has become so reviled by privacy experts, security researchers and lawmakers that antivirus makers have promised to do more to better detect the spyware.

TechCrunch obtained a copy of the KidsGuard app. Using a burner Android phone with the microphones and cameras sealed, we tested the spywarecapabilities. We also uploaded the app to online malware scanning service VirusTotal, which runs uploaded files against dozens of different antivirus makers. Only eight antivirus engines flagged the sample as malicious — including Kaspersky, a member of the Coalition Against Stalkerware and F-Secure.

Yoong Jien Chiam, a researcher at F-SecureTactical Defense unit, analyzed the app and found it can obtain &GPS locations, account name, on-screen screenshots, keystrokes, and is also accessing photos, videos, and browser history.&

KidsGuarddeveloper, ClevGuard, does not make it easy to uninstall the spyware. But this brief guide will help you to identify if the spyware is on your device and how to remove it.

Before you continue, some versions of Android may have slightly different menu options, and you take these following steps at your own risk. This only removes the spyware, and does not delete any data that was uploaded to the cloud.

How to identify the spyware

If you have an Android device, go to Settings >Apps, then scroll down and see if &System Update Service& is listed. This is what ClevGuard calls the app to disguise it from the user. If you see it, it is likely that you are infected with the spyware.

First, remove the spyware as a &device administrator&

Go to Settings > Security, thenDevice administrators, then untick the &System Update Service& box, then hit Deactivate.

Then remove the app&usage access&

Now, go back to Settings > Security, then scroll to Apps with usage access. Once here, tap on &System Update Service,& then switch off the permit usage toggle.

Also remove the spyware¬ification access&

Once that is done, go back to Settings > Sound - notification, then go to Notification access. Now switch off the toggle for &System Update Service.&

Now you can uninstall the spyware from your device

Following those steps, you have effectively disabled the spyware. Now you are able to uninstall it. Go to Settings > Apps and scroll down to &System Update Service.& You should be able to hit Uninstall, but you may need to hit Force Stop first. Tap OK to uninstall the app. This may take a few minutes.

Secure your device again

Now that you&ve rid your device of the spyware, you&ll need to enable a couple of settings that were switched off when your device was first infected. Firstly, go back to Settings > Security, then switch off the toggle for Unknown sources. Secondly, go to the Play Store > Play Protect. If you have the option, select Turn on. Once iton, you should check to ensure that it &looks good.&

Tesla Model 3 is among the top 10 choices for car buyers in 2020, according to Consumer Reports. The nonprofit organization released its &Top Picks& of the year on Thursday, and it included Teslamost affordable vehicle alongside cars from automakers including Toyota, Subaru, Honda, Kia and Lexus.

The Model 3 was chosen as one of three vehicles in the $45K-$55K category, alongside the Lexus RX and the Toyota Supra. CR lauded its &thrilling driving experience,& including &impressive handling and quick precise steering [that] help it feel like a sports car.& They did ding it slightly for having a &stiff ride& overall, but said that thatmore than made up for by its long EV battery range and emission-free eco-friendly qualities.

Consumer Reports also specifically called out a worry about the Model 3 that &Autopilot, an optional system on the vehicle, does not require the driver to stay engaged, creating safety concerns.& Tesla has always positioned Autopilot as a driver-assist feature that still requires a driver to be ready to take over control at a momentnotice, but critics have suggested its implementation can lead to misuse resulting in inattentiveness.

Clearly, that concern wasn&t enough to prevent CR from counting the Model 3 among its top recommendations for vehicles in 2020. Tesla also ended up ranking 11th overall out of 33 automakers in Consumer Reports& 2020 automotive brand report card, climbing eight positions from last year. The Model 3, and the rapid improvements that Tesla was able to make in its production as it scaled assembly of the vehicle, clearly helped it in the eyes of the consumer-focused nonprofit.

A spyware app designed to &monitor everything& on a victimphone has been secretly installed on thousands of phones.

The app, KidsGuard, claims it can &access all the information& on a target device, including its real-time location, text messages, browser history, access to its photos, videos and app activities, and recordings of phone calls.

But a misconfigured server meant the app was also spilling out the secretly uploaded contents of victims& devices to the internet.

These consumer-grade spyware apps — also known as &stalkerware& — have come under increased scrutiny in recent years for allowing and normalizing surveillance, often secretly and without obtaining permission from their victims. Although many of these apps are marketed toward parents to monitor their childactivities, many have repurposed the apps to spy on their spouses. Thatprompted privacy groups and security firms to work together to help better identify stalkerware.

KidsGuard is no different. Its maker, ClevGuard, pitches the spyware app as a &stealthy& way to keep children safe, but also can be used to &catch a cheating spouse or monitor employees.&

But the security lapse offers a rare insight into how pervasive and intrusive these stalkerware apps can be.

ClevGuardwebsite, which makes the KidsGuard phone spyware (Image: TechCrunch)

TechCrunch obtained a copy of the Android app from Till Kottmann, a developer who reverse-engineers apps to understand how they work.

Kottmann found that the app was exfiltrating the contents of victims& phones to an Alibaba cloud storage bucket — which was named to suggest that the bucket only stored data collected from Android devices. Itbelieved the bucket was inadvertently set to public, a common mistake made — often caused by human error — nor was it protected with a password.

Using a burner Android device with the microphone sealed and the cameras covered, TechCrunch installed the app and used a network traffic analysis tool to understand what data was going in and out of the device — and was able to confirm Kottmannfindings.

The app, which has to be bought and downloaded from ClevGuard directly, can be installed in a couple of minutes. (ClevGuard claims it also supports iPhones by asking for iCloud credentials to access the contents of iCloud backups, which is against Applepolicies.) The app has to be installed by a person with physical access to a victimphone, but the app does not require rooting or jailbreaking. The Android app also requires that certain in-built security features are disabled, such as allowing non-Google approved apps to be installed and disabling Google Play Protect, which helps to prevent malicious apps from running.

Once installed, ClevGuard says its app works in &stealth& and isn&t visible to the victim. It does that by masquerading itself as an Android &system update& app, which looks near-indistinguishable from legitimate system services.

And because thereno app icon, itdifficult for a victim to know their device has been compromised.

KidsGuard is designed to look like an Android app (Image: TechCrunch)

Because we only had the Android app and not a paid subscription to the service, we were limited in how much we could test. Through our testing, TechCrunch found that the app silently and near-continually siphons off content from a victimphone, including whatstored in their photos and video apps, and recordings of the victimphone calls.

The app also gives whomever install the app access to who the victim is talking to and when on a variety of apps, such as WhatsApp, Instagram, Viber and Facebook Messenger, and the app also boasts the ability to monitor a victimactivities on dating apps like Tinder. The app secretly takes screenshots of a victimconversations in apps like Snapchat and Signal to capture the messages before they are set to disappear.

The spyware app maker can also record and monitor the precise location of a device, and access their browsing history.

Although the app says it can access a victimcontacts, the uploaded data stored in the exposed bucket did not include contact lists or easily identifiable information on the victim, making it difficult for TechCrunch to notify victims in bulk.

But one victim we spoke to said she found out just a few days earlier that spyware had been installed on her phone.

&It was my husband,& said the victim. The two had been separated, she said, but he was able to access her private messages by secretly installing the spyware on her phone. &I gave him the choice to show me how he was doing it or I was getting a divorce, so he finally showed me last night,& she said.

ClevGuard shut down the exposed cloud storage bucket after we contacted the company. We also contacted Alibaba, which also alerted the company of the exposure.

&This is evidence that not only are spouseware and stalkerware companies morally bankrupt, they are also often failing to protect their stolen user data once they have it,& said Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who also examined the app.

&The fact that this also includes the data of young children is both alarming and sickening,& said Quintin. &This one tiny company had around 3,000 infections worldwide, which lays bare the massive scope of the spouseware and stalkerware industry.&

Itthe latest in a long stream of spyware companies that have either had data breaches or exposed systems. Vice tech news site Motherboard has reported on many, including mSpy, Mobistealth and Flexispy. The Federal Trade Commission also launched legal action against one spyware app maker, Retina-X, which had two data breaches involving sensitive victim data.

If you think you are a victim of KidsGuard, this is how you can identify and remove the malware.

Got a tip? You can send tips securely over Signal and WhatsApp to +1 646-755&8849.