Maybe I’ve always misunderstood the term but it seemed to me that spyware was a category of malware that would secretly and excessively harvest user data whatever the purpose or the actor behind it. I’d guess this was more likely to be done for commercial or criminal purposes than state surveillance or espionnage.

Indeed, this quote seems a gross misrepresentation but is it not that harvesting of user data for commercial purposes has become so ubiquitous that the term has shifted to only designate malware used by actual spies?