This is a news article that almost meets the criteria of "dog bites man". A Snooping software company making it’s software less invasive, not because the law forced them to, but because they have a conscience. But I really recommend you read the complete survey on the snooping software market and legality article, it’s interesting.
Mr. Eaton is the founder of TrueActive, which makes a computer program that buyers can install on a
target computer and monitor everything that the machine’s user does on the PC.
Spying with software has been around for several years but Mr. Eaton decided that one new feature in his program crossed a line between monitoring and snooping.
That feature is called "silent deploy," which allows the buyer to place the program on someone else’s computer secretly via e-mail, without having physical access to the machine. To Mr. Eaton, that constituted an invitation to install unethical and even illegal wiretaps. He made the change, he said, "so we could live with ourselves." …
… Law enforcement officials seem to agree. According to Chris Johnson, a federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, the F.B.I. recently began an investigation in California into the maker of one program, LoverSpy, that advertises heavily via junk e-mail, or spam….
But at least one program, he said, may not pose a real threat — of spying, at least. Mr. Gordon said that his company’s security researchers, working with the Justice Department, were unable to find any actual working software that could be downloaded from the LoverSpy site after paying the fee.
He seemed less than stunned by the notion that a product advertised via spam might not be all that it was claimed to be. "You can’t be all that surprised," he said.
They claim a defense against slander is the truth. I guess a defense against invasive spyware is to advertise it, charge for it, and then not supply it? Kind of like selling cigarettes to minors and then it turns out the pack is empty 
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