How to create a Spy/Monitoring System in *nix system

Mayank Gupta
8 min readDec 27, 2018

Parental watch at its best

Credits: Unsplash

Have you been worried as a parent for what stuff do your children watch on computer? Well I have been too. But, not exactly.

I’m not a parent but I have a younger brother who needs monitoring. He gets distracted very often and feeds us lies when asked “What productive work did you do on computer?”

I know, I know what you all are thinking. Is this guy a SADIST? Why not let the growth of kid take a natural course? Why not let the kid explore the open world?

Well you are right! But learning needs focus. And without focus any type of learning is quite impossible be it cooking, driving, programming, etc. If the person knows what he does is wrong and knows he’s being monitored; he won’t dare get distracted. Yes, I installed the monitoring system only after I told my brother I would be setting such a surprise in your computer.

I created a spy system which logs all the keys and clicks a screenshot every minute then sends both (the key input logs and the screenshot) to your google drive. It lacks Windows & Mac support out of the box (as of now), but will make it multi platform soon along with other improvements that I have in mind. I only tested it on Ubuntu but should work on all other Linux distributions as well.

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Mayank Gupta

I’m a full time Data Scientist, part time software developer, stock market enthusiast and GSOC’17 veteran. https://mayankgupta.in