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A Hacker Has Wiped a Spyware Company's Servers -- Again (vice.com)
Last year, a vigilante hacker broke into the servers of a company that sells spyware to everyday consumers and wiped their servers, deleting photos captured from monitored devices. A year later, the hacker has done it again. Motherboard: Thursday, the hacker said he started wiping some cloud servers that belong to Retina-X Studios, a Florida-based company that sells spyware products targeted at parents and employers, but that are also used by people to spy on their partners without their consent. Retina-X was one of two companies that were breached last year in a series of hacks that exposed the fact that many otherwise ordinary people surreptitiously install spyware on their partners' and children's phones in order to spy on them. This software has been called "stalkerware" by some.
I run a Raspberry Pi running Pi-hole for my kids. I don't whitelist them, I blacklist the things I don't want them to see or use. With age comes more availability. In addition to blocking ads, beacons, and tracking evil at the DNS level, the Pi-hole allows you to truly see what happens at the DNS level on your personal network. It's pretty eye opening to see what's phoning "home". I never knew my Netgear router needed to phone Disney due to the child protection element built in (now nixed). It's alarming to see how much chatter Windows machines engage in with the mothership (again, nixed). You may not can turn off all of the Windows telemetry, but you can nix the DNS calls to the telemetry servers easily.