I think he meant put a physical cover over the lens.

You can still be fingerprinted based off the scratches on the lens.

https://www.insider.com/facebook-patent-photos-fingerprint-d...

If someone has hacked your computer such that they can control your camera, how worried are you about being fingerprinted?

I'm pretty sure I've seen similar attempts to identify a specific camera using things like sensor noise patterns and lens aberrations

Maybe, but more important, a potential hacker cannot see me nor my family anymore

that link is giving me a 404

You can't really put a cover over a microphone.

Nothing really helps when everyone is voluntarily buying always on surveillance tubes, headphones and glasses with Alexa/Google assistant that's always listening

I could imagine a mini-microphone playing continuous noise of the appropriate 'color' to mask everything.

Then turn off the speaker when you want to use the mic.

Or do what Snowden does and de-solder the microphone and rely on manually plugging in a mic in the headphone jack.

I considered doing that and using an external microphone, but I don't trust my skills to get everything back together in one piece. Even getting access to the board to do it seems to require the use of destructive force. I'd probably be perfectly fine with a phone that didn't include a mic and required an external one though. While I do use it to place and answer calls sometimes, it's almost exclusively used for texting, and I haven't run into an occasion where loss of audio while recording video would matter.