spyware is any program that reports information about you, your activities, or your system back to a 3rd party...
like adware, spyware can sometimes have legitimate uses... for example winamp can (if so configured) report usage statistics back to nullsoft... windows xp, upon encountering a crashed application will offer to send a memory dump of the application to microsoft... even your browser reports information about you back to the websites you're on so that those websites can show you data that is appropriate for you such as the contents of your online shopping cart if you happen to be on an online store's site...
as the name suggests, however, there are more sinister uses for spyware such as stealing passwords or credit card information... this type of spyware generally gets installed or reports to a 3rd party without the user's knowledge and/or permission...
spyware that spies on you without your knowledge and/or permission qualifies as a type of trojan... in fact, the term spyware is so pejorative that it is almost exclusively used to refer to those examples that also qualify as trojan horse programs...
there is a complication in the spyware landscape, however... this complication arises because sometimes the user of a computer and the owner of that computer are not the same person... some organizations use spyware to monitor what their workers are doing on the organization's computers and while the spyware qualify as a trojan in more conventional circumstances it's (arguably) not a trojan in these particular contexts because it has permission from the person/people who matter...
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