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Dear Apple: for Christmas I'd like physical, no-bullshit power shutoff switches for your camera and microphone on the Macbook Pro. Other devices too—if you can
by asark 7y ago
Dear Apple: for Christmas I'd like physical, no-bullshit power shutoff switches for your camera and microphone on the Macbook Pro. Other devices too—if you can manage it, that'd be great. Sincerely, the people who put tape over their cameras, the people who don't because it's ugly and messes with closing the lid but wish they could, and the people who would be in one of those two camps if they understood the risk (so, altogether, 100% of your users).
- LeoPanthera 7y agoHave you noticed that the people who tape up their laptop camera almost always still carry around a smartphone in their pocket 100% of the time.
- mtrpcic 7y agoThe difference being that the smartphone camera isn't pointed at your face or room the entire time the device is in use.
- LeoPanthera 7y agoFrankly I don't think it's the camera that people should be most concerned about - it's the microphone.
- gsich 7y agoWhy?
- nothrabannosir 7y agoA smartphone is significantly more secure than a computer. I install lord knows what NPM package from God knows where on a weekly basis. Only since very recently does mic or camera access cause any kind of system prompt on Mac. Smartphones , for all their faults , at least are far less vulnerable to viruses than pcs. Or at least iOS vs Mac.
- admax88q 7y agoYour device is as secure as you make it. Why are you installing "lord knows what npm package" on your laptop?
- layoutIfNeeded 7y ago>Why are you installing "lord knows what npm package" on your laptop? Probably because he installs lord knows what npm packages to his production servers too.
- admax88q 7y agoI don't get why people who even admit that they dont trust these random npm packages can think its okay to ship them in production and put all their user's data at risk. It's malpractice.
- nothrabannosir 7y agoI’d love to know a metric of trust and its relation to customer data. How many trust points for how much PII? I’m assuming it’s a logarithmic scale? And a Debian stable package gets , what, double the points of an npm package? Or I guess it depends on the weekly downloads? What about pip, gems, vim plugins, emacs packages (I’m looking at you melpa) , quicklisp, ... Then we can play an honest thought experiment: how many people satisfy that metric? Don’t forget to correct for actually how much PII points one is handling. If you don’t at least have some consideration of those factors, claiming malpractice seems fatuous.
- admax88q 7y agoIt's not a question of establishing an absolute scale of trust. It's about admitting that you consider npm packages to be insecure, but you run them in production anyways. Imagine you believed that steel had a 10% chance of spontaneous combustion, regardless of whether its true or not, if you believe that and you still built a bridge out of it, that's malpractice.
- zonidjan 7y agoCan my smartphone see anything from inside my pocket?
- meruru 7y agoI tape my phone cameras too.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- atonse 7y agoFrom my understanding, Apple has done sort of what you're asking for, they've hooked up the physical wiring of the camera LED to the camera itself, so it is physically impossible to power the camera without the LED being turned on (as opposed to the "turn on LED" being part of firmware logic that could be hacked).
- jonny_eh 7y agoWhat about the mic?
- t34543 7y agoI’ve read this as well but my macbook senses ambient light and adjusts my backlight accordingly. Isn’t this through the camera - with no LED?
- Analemma_ 7y agoNo, the ambient light sensing is done with a light sensor on the body - look for the tiny hole drilled into the chassis. It doesn't use the camera.
- ljm 7y agoRemember when they did that for your battery power indicator! With a little button to trigger it.
- eightysixfour 7y agohttps://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/347895/where-is-the-true-tone-ambient-light-sensor-on-the-2018-macbook-pro https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/347895/where-is-th...
- klodolph 7y agoThe ambient light sensor is right next to the camera, I think it's usually to the left. It's a bit hard to test since they're close together. Macs have had ambient light sensors for a long time. For example, take an old iMac and put it to sleep. The power light will pulse with a period of about 2s, and the brightness will depend on the ambient light level. Edit: Just tested on my MBP. Opened photo booth, covered the camera with my thumb, shone a bright flashlight at the point just left of the camera. The display got brighter but Photo Booth showed no changes in what the camera was seeing.
- hereme888 7y agoThat's what the Purism laptops have. But they're linux-based (although I hear Mac OS is based on linux kernel).
- ohazi 7y agoMac OS is in no way based on the Linux kernel.
- amelius 7y agoPerhaps it would be if the license was different.
- arcticbull 7y agoThey began development at NeXT in 1985, 6 years before Linux.
- jedberg 7y agoUnlikely. The Apple kernel guys are purists and would probably use the BSD kernel even if Linux were MIT licensed.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- asveikau 7y agoIn the 90s they had a project called MkLinux that had Linux combined with Mach in a similar position to where BSD is in XNU. This was shortly after the NeXT acquisition. I bet they were considering it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MkLinux
- pietroglyph 7y agomacOS is based upon XNU, which was based upon the Mach kernel (with bits of BSD userspace), not Linux.
- 7y ago
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Nextgrid 7y agoIf an attacker can access your webcam/microphone at will this means they can run arbitrary code to capture your screen, display anything you want and capture your keystrokes. In this case the camera or microphone is the least of your worries.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoI think I understand the risk, and I definitely would not bother with such a switch even were it available. So maybe I actually don't understand it. What exactly is the risk? Have there been any actual cases of someone being spied on with their laptop webcam that would have been prevented by a switch? I'm only aware of cases where the webcam switch would not have helped (e.g. roommate sets up notebook to record owner naked). Even that is incredibly rare, or if not rare, almost never reported.
- simcop2387 7y agoHere's a case that went to court about it, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School_District https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
- packet_nerd 7y agoA quick search seems to turn up quite a few examples of webcam spying. I'd love to see actual numbers, but it doesn't seem to be "incredibly rare". https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5228017/Hackers-using-webcams-turn-people-slaves.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5228017/Hack... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2638874/More-90-people-nabbed-creepware-hacker-sting-victim-Miss-Teen-USA-describes-terror-watched-webcam-YEAR.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2638874/More-90-peo... https://globalnews.ca/news/2158281/what-you-need-to-know-about-webcam-hacking-and-how-to-prevent-it/ https://globalnews.ca/news/2158281/what-you-need-to-know-abo... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10131456/Hackers-using-webcams-to-spy-on-women-in-their-homes.html https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10131456/Hackers... This site claims a guy made a business selling software to hack and remotely control webcams, complete with paid employees and $350,000 in income: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2015/04/21/webcam-hacking/ https://www.welivesecurity.com/2015/04/21/webcam-hacking/
- asdfasgasdgasdg 7y agoOK. That has caused me to update my beliefs. I still think that there is relatively little risk -- like, you should be much more worried about being in a car accident -- but I no longer think it's on par with being struck by lightning.
- sethhochberg 7y agoIf anyone is looking for a nice webcam cover for laptops, I've found the super-thin ones (marketed as "0.7mm thin" by EYSOFT and others on Amazon, etc) are fantastic. Very cheap, very thin, visually unobtrusive, and dead-simple to use. Doesn't interfere with closing my Macbook at all, it protrudes less than the rubber bumper around the screen border. Still miss the physical mic mute button on my old Thinkpad X230... and it didn't have a webcam button for that, but we've _almost_ had all of the right features in the past...
- kraig 7y agoFWIW I had one of these on my laptop and the screen now has a crack that started right where this was.
- TheRealSteel 7y agoAlso note that the webcam closes onto the large, glass trackpad on Apple laptops, increasing the risk of damage if any debris gets in between there.
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoDear user, we'll tell you what you want. --Apple
- IloveHN84 7y agoWhy only Dear Apple? Dear Dell, dear Lenovo and dear Asus, enable your products with physical switches
- galad87 7y agomacOS already ask the user for permission the first time an app tries to use a camera/microphone. If you want to be asked each time, install OverSight.
- naicuoctavian 7y agoYou can find "slim" webcam privacy covers on Amazon. Since they can slide it they're a better solution than tape.