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That would be an excellent feature and years ago I had a laptop that had a simple plastic sliding piece that would cover the camera lens. Later versions elimina
by mdip 13y ago
That would be an excellent feature and years ago I had a laptop that had a simple plastic sliding piece that would cover the camera lens. Later versions eliminated this piece (it probably broke off too frequently).
I have taped a piece of aluminum foil over every webcam on my laptops/iMac with a large piece of packing tape (making it possible to pull it aside when I do rather frequent video conferences).
I get dismissed as paranoid (or the next question that's asked is "what do you do in front of your computer!"). What they don't understand is that years ago I wrote software for a building access kiosk that involved a one-way video chat, followed with a photograph taken of the visitor. I used an open source library for interacting with the camera. When video was running, the light was on. I had the worst time getting the camera to take a picture, but after a bit of tinkering (read: shooting bullets randomly), I had it working. It was my coworker that noticed the light didn't come on when the picture was being taken. I had done something wrong (so wrong that every few pictures, the camera would stop working and wouldn't recover until the entire machine was rebooted). Though I've been writing software professionally for twenty years or so, I had never wrote code to interact with a web cam and yet had somehow managed to stumble upon this entirely by accident. It gave me the willies, so from that point forward, I covered my cameras with a bit of ugly aluminum foil.
I've never really worried about the microphone, but it would be nice to have some kind of hardware control to disable devices that can be used to record in that manner.
- fidotron 13y agoI've recently run into one where it's possible to make Android devices recognize the faces of people in front of the device via the front facing camera with no sign of this to the user. Someone has to actually start an app (which needs camera access) and it is possible for it to be killed, but I too did this entirely by accident and would now be super wary about it.
- Crito 13y agoA few months ago I added a little tiny square of electrical tape over the front-facing camera in my phone. I never have a reason to take pictures of myself, so I'd rather that camera not exist at all.
- gcb1 13y agodo that with all my laptops. specially work issued ones ridden with remote access for IT. a post it cut with just the glue part works fine, easy to replace and leaves no marks.
- pyrocat 13y agoBlack electrical tape is a much sleeker solution.
- transitionality 13y agoYou're most certainly not paranoid. Three-letter agencies have malware in the wild that can operate a webcam without turning on a light. It's probably well-targeted at specific people, but you can't know whether you're a target (until it's too late, anyway). http://bgr.com/2013/12/18/apple-macbook-webcam-spying/ http://bgr.com/2013/12/18/apple-macbook-webcam-spying/