Kaspersky actually has a good track record of NOT being anything malicious (Except for old times when it seemed to flag pirate software quite often).

However, if the tool is closed-source, this is naturally against Linux ethos and is generally something to avoid, given extensive permissions.

Well, on the other side I have Steam and most of the games there are closed source… Yes they run in user mode and (usually) don’t have kernel level access.