wow that is dirty! Quick responses not in any particular order: Firstly, if they intended to include any such item the knowledge of its presence should have been fully disclosed to all parents before the laptops were given out. Secondly, it should have been an optional feature not secretly hidden on all laptops given out. Thirdly, the proposal to do this should have been discussed with parents before the laptops even became available. Many schools have parent-teacher groups that discuss issues such as this and should have been put to them to discuss its plusses & minuses & whether the parents would agree (possibly via a parental letter with a reply-poll questionnaire) on the topic proposal before it was adopted.

The full abilities of this spyware were hidden. The school claims this and that in retrospect, however such spyware can potentially be loaded with nasty little tricks including spying on their internet movements, email spying (including gathering their email addresses), access to all their private files & documents, and at worse, actually sending files to their computer or deleting files or doing some other kind of remote control over their computer.

Depends on location such as country & local laws as to what kind of privacy laws would have been broken. I'd tend to think this would break laws in most parts of world in one form or another including cyber laws. Not to mention lots of other privacy & spy laws & tracking laws etc.