A court ruled that even if parents install a monitoring program on a child's cellphone with the child's consent, it may be illegal if it has a call recording function. Recording and listening to call contents without the consent of the person on the other end of the line with the child constitutes third-party interception.
According to legal sources on the 22nd, the Criminal Division 2 of the Busan High Court (Presiding Judge Park Un-sam) dismissed the appeal of a defendant identified as A, who was indicted on charges including violating the Protection of Communications Secrets Act, and upheld the lower court's sentence of seven years in prison and seven years of disqualification. For an employee identified as B, who was tried together, the court overturned the lower court and sentenced B to one year and six months in prison, suspended for three years, and three years of disqualification. B had been sentenced in the first trial to one year and six months in prison and three years of disqualification.
A was the head of a related company, and B was an employee. They are accused of selling illegal wiretapping programs to 6,008 people from January 2019 to November 2024.
The program consisted of a "parent app" used by the monitor and a "child app" installed on the cellphone of the monitored person. Once the child app was installed, GPS location information, text messages, and call contents were automatically intercepted, stored, and recorded, and the related data were transmitted to the company's server so the parent app user could check them.
The program was found to have been promoted as usable not only for monitoring children but also for monitoring a spouse's infidelity. Customers were mainly recruited through private detective agencies.
In court, A and others argued, "We only sold a program that included an interception function, and it was the customers who actually committed illegal acts," adding they did not incite interception or carry it out themselves.
But the appellate court did not accept this.
The court first found that even if the program buyer obtained the monitored person's consent to install the child app, recording and listening to call contents without the call counterpart's consent is illegal. Even if the monitored person is a child and the monitor is a parent, recording calls without the other party's consent constitutes a third party's interception.
On that basis, the court found that "the sale of this program played a functionally indispensable role in the customers' illegal acts." It concluded that the conduct did not merely aid and abet illegal acts, but essentially contributed to them.
Regarding sentencing, the court said, "Given that the distribution period of the program was a long period of about six years, that there were as many as 122,922 stored call records on the server, and that the revenue from program sales reached 3.3 billion won, the degree of blameworthiness is high."