God, boyfriends who don’t notify their girlfriends of their every precise, waking geographical move, twenty four hours a day, amirite?! Jerks.
Brazil totally gets the whole keeping tabs on your significant other thing, with smart phones providing the convenient, charming utility of aiding those ripe for the stalking. Brazilians empathise with the veritable lack of boundaries thing so much that once the app that is exactly like what it sounds, Boyfriend Tracker, was made available, downloads went crazy, and people felt slightly better about themselves that they were bestowed handy ability to casually, and by casually I mean incessantly, monitor their partners. Ugh, romantic <3
According to TIME, downloads for the Boyfriend Tracker app surged in two months, with 50,000 crazies seeing the beauty of an Orwellian fantasy in their very palms and taking up the app without hesitation.
The maker of the app explained that Brazilians have a tendency to participate in a culture where frequent changing of partners is commonplace, and, naturally, “People really appreciate having a tool to help them find out whether they’re being cheated on.” The Age reported its features were slightly more insane than just a pin drop on a map: “Functions include sending the person doing the tracking updates on their partner’s location and forwarding duplicates of text message traffic from the targeted phone. There is even a command that allows a user to force the target phone to silently call their own, like a pocket dial, so they can listen in on what the person is saying.”
Despite seemingly participating in a deeply ironic meta narrative (Google admitted this week that they were paid by the NSA to extract information from Edward Snowden’s leaked PRISM), Google Play has pulled the app from their store, providing no reason, but you can go ahead and assume their justification is somewhere on the lines of “It’s just fucking creepy.”
Via TIME.
