>Please don't follow this advice. Frothing at the mouth about spyware on your kids computer will immediately be dismissed as insane ravings, and possibly get a visit from your local child safety organization.

I don't think parent described 'frothing at the mouth', and furthermore the concept of "I shouldn't speak out otherwise I may paint myself as a target for child protective services" is so subversive and nu-speak like that I don't think I can ever support it. CPS is supposed to be a social service for the support of children; not a society control and opinion-steering organization.

If parent did something publicly that'd warrant the visit, sure; but creating public awareness of the situation for the parents can be done in an orderly and respectful way -- no one suggested otherwise.

Speaking out is not something that puts you at risk. Showing unstable behavior by escalating a simple technical support issue into a rant about ‘spyware’ at some board of Ed meeting tends to raise eyebrows though.

Asking “Does anyone know how to refer these people to law enforcement for prosecution?” regarding a technical support issue is not respectful or orderly behavior.

From Wikipedia [1]:

> GoGuardian products allow teachers and administrators to view and snapshot students' computer screens, close and open browser tabs, and see running applications. GoGuardian can collect information about any activity when users are logged onto their accounts, including data originating from a student's webcam, microphone, keyboard, and screen, along with historical data such as browsing history. This collection can be performed whether students connect from school-provided or personally-owned devices.

I can only describe this as, well, spyware. No need for scare quotes. The OP has every right to be angry about this.

To describe this as a "simple technical support issue" is some blatant euphemism.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoGuardian

A pedo-criminal hacker's wet dream. If one manages to compromise accounts of some teachers, or worse, some school admin accounts, or is an insider at the school or GoGuardian itself...

And before anybody says, that things like these only happen in the movies, or bad crime TV shows... they do happen in real life as well. I remember a case here in Germany, where somebody had managed to install RATs on ~150 school-age girls' laptops, tho using some spear-hunting, and when he was raided, police found a large collection of videos he had recorded with the girls' webcams[0].

That there are sexually-motivated hacks should be clear to the wider public at least since the so called Fappening.

As for insiders, NSA staff spied on ex-partners, love interests and spouses[1], to a degree where they internally coined the term "LOVEINT" for it. If the paranoid NSA cannot "manage" their own people, then what chance would a GoGuardian or school have, I wonder.

[0] https://www.t-online.de/digital/sicherheit/id_42278570/hacke...

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-surveillance-watchdog...

Having a 'right to be angry' doesn't mean being angry is the tactic to further one's goals.

My point was that the parent comment was downplaying the significance of the problem and shifting blame on the victim with statements like this:

> escalating a simple technical support issue into a rant about ‘spyware’

The right tactic for objecting to school officials was besides my point.

Calling unremovable* spyware (the term is accurate, no matter how insane you think it sounds) a "technical support issue" is like calling surveillance cameras installed in your home an "improper furnishing issue".

*Edit: sokoloff may be correct, and the spyware is not unremovable. Still, the analogy holds.

Is it unremovable from the device, though? It isn’t clearly defined in the account above whether it was removed (and then reinstalled with the subsequent kid’s login).

Yes. It would be re installed at login

What is accurate or not in some platonic sense doesn't have much bearing on what tactic will yield the results you want in practice.