Phone surveillance is the act of performing surveillance

Surveillance

Surveillance is the monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people. It is sometimes done in a surreptitious manner...

 of phone conversations, location tracking and data monitoring of a phone. Before the era of mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

s, these used to refer to the tapping of phone lines via a method called wiretapping. Wiretapping has now been replaced by software that monitors the cell phones of users.

While mobile phone surveillance has been carried out by large organisation for a long time, especially for clues of illegal activities, more and more such surveillance are now carried out by individuals for personal reasons. This brings in the moral, ethical and legal question of who owns your privacy

Privacy

Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves and thereby reveal themselves selectively...

?

Prevalence

According to a 1998 American Management Association

American Management Association

The American Management Association , based in New York City, is a corporate training and consulting group that provides a variety of educational and management development services to businesses, government agencies and individuals. The non-profit membership organization offers business courses in...

 report, 43% of companies actually tap phone conversations and review computer file

Computer file

A computer file is a block of arbitrary information, or resource for storing information, which is available to a computer program and is usually based on some kind of durable storage. A file is durable in the sense that it remains available for programs to use after the current program has finished...

s and email

Email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

s of employees. No newer data is available on the number of phone surviellance carried out currently, but the numbers are anectdoctally high.

Phone surveillance software

Phone surveillance in now more commonely carried out on cell phones. This is become increasingly easy with the availability of cell phone monitoring softwares. These softwares are easily purchased over the internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 and can be quickly installed in any phone that the person has access to. There has been questions as to whether these softwares are illegal. Most of the software makers circumvent this problem but placing a disclaimer

Disclaimer

A disclaimer is generally any statement intended to specify or delimit the scope of rights and obligations that may be exercised and enforced by parties in a legally recognized relationship...

 that they do not endorse any illegal activities. , The Onus is then on the user of the software to ensure he or she doesn't break any law.

Stopping Phone surveillance

For now, phone surveillance seems to be difficult to detect nor prevent. There are securities company who can help clear these softwares from the cell phone, although it is practically impossible for everyone to do that. The law has yet to set a clear boundary on who can or who cannot do phone surveillance. A 2005 federal court ruling denies the FBI from tracking cell phone locations of people who have not committed any crimes.