I'm trying to help (probably badly, but..) a friend deal with parents that they expect are spying on them.

I know that in general, it's impossible to secure a computer that you can't trust and don't necessarily have administrator privileges to.

But their parents are not exactly the NSA -- any spying that's happening is almost definitely some sort of product, plus basic things like maybe looking through their history. (I don't know much about they're situation -- maybe they know more, so well-if-you-know-they-do-this-then-you-could-do-this type advice would still be helpful.)

Would antivirus be able to detect spy-on-your-kids products? Would they be able to scan their computer with like Immunet or something, even if they didn't have administrator privileges?

Tor would probably help -- unless the monitoring was looking at the RAM or something for website names, which would be way overkill on a commercial product, no? Or (more likely) if it was taking screenshots at regular intervals, which would also break running a VM or something. (Is there any way to detect taking screenshots?)

I know probably the best thing would be running TAILS as a LiveCD -- the problem with that is that it's REALLY obvious over-the-shoulder.

Um, thoughts about any of those?

Any other things about parents as a threat model in general?

I know this is pretty far from what is usually discussed on here, but I'm really interested in what you think/it would potentially help a lot of people.