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One of my friends always keeps her MacBook open, and had Skype set up to auto-answer video calls. (Until I fixed that for her.) She's a very educated profession
by auctiontheory 13y ago
One of my friends always keeps her MacBook open, and had Skype set up to auto-answer video calls. (Until I fixed that for her.) She's a very educated professional woman who teaches at a university you've heard of.
In other words, HN readers might come up with defensive hacks, but 99% of the population is completely vulnerable to all kinds of spying, whether government or stalker, and the situation can only get worse as wireless electronics pervade every part of our lives. Books? Internet-enabled. Fridge? Internet-enabled. Car? Internet-enabled. Our own bodies? Carry wireless-connected smartphone 24x7.
- Zikes 13y agoOne could argue that devising an effective privacy strategy to build into new device categories would be a waste of time until the devices are sufficiently popular enough to warrant the effort. Now that we've reached that tipping point there should be sufficient interest from an adequate number of skilled and educated people to begin to work on solving this problem.
- bithive123 13y agoDisplay-mounted cameras should have a sliding lens cap built in which can close (but not open) itself after a configurable period of non-use.
- indrax 13y agoWhich then nearly ruins the use case of theft recovery software. Sometimes you want to turn on the camera in software.
- bigiain 13y agoI wonder where the balance of good things vs bad things that've happened due to software-enableable laptop cameras currently sits? I strongly suspect that the number of stolen laptops recovered thanks to the owner being able to use the camera to "invade the privacy and potentially take creep-shots" of the unauthorized current user, is way way smaller than the number of people who've had their privacy invaded and potentially had creepshots taken by their laptops unauthorized "p0wners".