Am I the only one to receive disarming responses when trying to educate anybody over this matter? The vast majority of people (and when I say "vast majority" I mean everybody but two or three people tops, so far) I tried to explain things to don't care. All they have to say are things like "Where is your tinfoil hat?", "This is conspiracy theory", "If they want to spy us there's nothing we can do" and the never old "I have nothing to fear because I have nothing to hide."
Even when you provide material from authoritative sources you still risk being told "Bullshit, go figure who wrote this".
My laptop is black and I keep a piece of black electrical tape over it so it's mostly unnoticeable if you aren't close enough. I do this to avoid giving explanations because from my experience it is pointless.
The best comeback to this is usually asking if they have drapes/shades for their windows at home. I think I read that in a CCC guide to talking about privacy/security somewhere. At least that has lead to somewhat interesting discussions and the occasional moment of "you might have a point".
Cool. Now, can I have your wallet/purse? Also, get naked. I want to see what you're hiding under your clothes.
And you can forward your medical record, along with your business emails to me as well.
Because you have nothing to hide....
Maybe something like 'security theatre'.
The potential to listen to audio on unpatched, compromised devices, is a huge attack vector! And yet we tape up cameras.
Worked like a charm.
The warm and fuzzy feeling that discovery gave me is why my daily driver is still on Win7 since I almost always have both audio directions muted.
I mean, if you can turn the LED off through software, it's really no better than the little menu bar icon that every other laptop has. If it were done all in hardware, that would be cool.
The fact that Windows10 breaks it surely suggests it's a software feature?
There's a difference between "I can turn this off as long as the driver is properly installed and has not been hacked" and "I can't turn this off." While the second statement is abstractly true for both, the bar for some software silently and invisibly turning on the microphone is quite a bit higher if it also requires replacing or hacking the audio hardware drivers.
When I'm done using my laptop I close it.
Given how everything is angled, I suppose a webcam infiltrator would have a perfect view of me sleeping.
Personally, I only use my laptop when I am away from my office. And my office happens to be my bedroom.
My mother learned to do this from the IT Security team at her company. And I learned to do that from her. It simply never occurred to me that the Facetime camera, hidden on the MBP, can be turned on at anytime without the status light being activated. I keep a small box of those post-its in my go bag and share them liberally.
It is creating general awareness.
Protecting your privacy should NOT be weird and a sticker over your webcam is a very visible way of showing that to the public. When people ask why I do it, its a good opportunity to educate them on the capabilities of the US government, other nation-state actors, and hackers in general. If they don't believe me and haven't heard of Snowden its simple to show them images of Zuckerberg, the FBI director, and other in tech with taped over webcams to convince them.
John Oliver also did a special last year that showed that a lot of people don't really care about the government getting most of their personal information on their computer. But when they think that the government is getting naked pictures of them and their family they're a lot more interested and upset. Bringing up the fact that the government can see them nude in conversation scares a lot more people and they are more inclined to become more privacy conscious.
If you use one of the bookmark post-it notes, it makes it easy to remove the sticker and put it back when you're done with your video conversation.