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Comment by bsmartt | Hacker News Reader

I promise you there are better ways to manipulate people in this situation. Like a keylogger. That way, your hypothetical LGBTQ child can't evade your monitoring by using an incogneto tab or simply pausing recall when they login.

steal their browser data. i haven't wiped my browser history in years, and that is just easy to search list of URLs dont need to be parsed out of some db blob (not something many anti-LGBTQ parents know how to / are going to do...). Steal their cookies and access their logged in social media accounts directly. Steal their saved passwords. Browse through the cached images and videos.

> Even then, we're still talking about a perfect surveillance engine

not even close. not going to beat this to a pulp but just to give you an idea, this does not scale well, not at all. are you going to look through 25 gb of photos? what if it's 90% cat pictures.

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This is correct technically, but not correct in practice. Yes, keyloggers and stuff are comprehensive. But this ignores accessibility and ease of use aspect. Keylogger is a software which you need to know about, then acquire it without being infected yourself (e.g. know trusted warez sites etc.), and have to install on the victim PC in advance (so no retroactive spying is possible). I wouldn't know where to get keylogger (stealthy one) without some research, despite working in IT for decades. And likely you would rist get sued for that if ti was ever exposed, so a large part of the population not yet sociopathic will balk at installing illegal keylogger.

Now contrast that with a 100% legal and already preinstalled keylogger 2.0, which is not only logging keypresses but everything. And it is on every home and work PC in the world. Of course the number of people tempted to use it to spy on the strangers will be about a 1000 times bigger than amount of people installing keyloggers today. And it will not only replace premediated planned spying, similar to the keylogger. But it will also allow spontaneous spying on every random PC you can see. Like walking past unattended unlocked PC and voila - you can check all history without going back in time to install keylogger in advance.

The scale of the problem is the real problem. That's the point.

There's monitoring software marketed towards parents, which I think for most parents would meet your concerns (ease of use, risk of malware, legality).

If the parent has access to the computer, then they'll generally already have all documents, browser/application history, and chat logs.

> Now contrast that with a 100% legal and already preinstalled keylogger 2.0, which is not only logging keypresses

Windows Recall doesn't log keypresses, to my understanding.

> Like walking past unattended unlocked PC and voila - you can check all history without going back in time to install keylogger in advance.

I feel extracting browser passwords and all their documents would typically be more damaging.

Why would that be worse when you have screenshots of everything they saw, typed, uploaded and broadcast? Passwords give you an account - this gives you everything done with the account. And all documents that were viewed, plus where they came from. This is way beyond passwords.

> Passwords give you an account - this gives you everything done with the account.

Passwords give you control - not just view-only access. You could transfer over much of what they own (money, servers, games, projects, ...) to yourself, use their identity for phishing their friends/colleagues, etc.

Even just for viewing data, I think having all files and passwords can be a greater level of invasion:

* You don't just have screenshots of some files they happened to open recently on this device (which for some formats, like audio, is useless) - you have every file they have saved on this device, every file they have in online/cloud storage, and every file on work network shares they have access to

* You don't just have a screenshot of them typing a subset of recent emails and chat messages - you have their full emails and chatlogs going back years, and can likely make a data access request to get a significantly larger portion of "everything done with the account" than recent snapshots would give you

* You don't just have their location the couple of times recent snapshots show Google Maps open - you have full location history from their phone

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