Gamers express concern over anti-cheats and assert them to be spyware running as "root" on Windows. Malware doesn't need to be ran at an elevated privilege (especially "root") to achieve it's objective of exfiltrating sensitive information or "spying" on you by watching what you're doing. All of this can be achieved easily from user mode and can (usually) work even in restricted environments. tl;dr these large game publishers don't need an anti-cheat to spy on you. They can do it easily from user mode.