[dkokelley]

I've been wondering about these services. Not having more information about the inner-workings of a monitoring/recovery service, I'm concerned about the company's ability to spy on me the same way I could spy on anyone who uses my stolen laptop. What prevents this from happening?

[mattvot]

Prey is open source so, if you knew how to, you could add some monitoring capabilities to Prey to make sure it isn't doing anything it shouldn't.

[NathanKP]

I suppose if you are worried about it you can use Wireshark or some other similar network traffic inspection tool to watch your traffic for suspicious communications you didn't authorize.