Even though you could get far more information by hacking the built in microphone.....

I would say you are equally likely to catch someone jacking off through the webcam as to catch valuable information through the microphone. They are therefore equally lucrative

How could it be equally lucrative? The amount of information someone can gather from a camera is much smaller than what you could gather from a microphone in a given room.

If I am in a conference room talking about strategy, an uncovered camera will just pick me up. The microphone will capture everyone’s conversation.

If you have your laptop in your bedroom, an uncovered camera can provide material for blackmail easily and fast.

Depends on your tolerance for shaming. I, for one, would probably be a bit pissed off if someone threaten to publish video of me jerking off, but wouldn't care about that enough to pay anyone any money. Listening to a secret conversations in conference room on the other hand, than can be valuable on it's own, no need to blackmail.

Honestly, unless you're cheating on your SO, society is growing increasingly tolerant/indifferent of most of the other things you could see on a webcam

Honestly. I could care less what society thinks. But the scenario where one would have their laptop open and awake in their bedroom while cheating on their spouse and have enough money to make blackmail worthwhile and trust the information won’t get out anyway is slim.

How many people are doing something that is worth the time to blackmail in front of a camera and have the means to pay a substantial sum of money compared to the value of corporate secrets?

Also what are the chances that a microphone wouldn’t overhear something incriminating even if the camera were covered in your bedroom?

And I am really not trying to go down the road of wondering if you are doing something incriminating in your bedroom and your partner is being completely silent what that implies.....

Your eyes

Blackmail potential. It's not the company meetings that criminals want to hack laptop cameras for.

You think state or even corporate espionage is less lucrative than someone blackmailing you because you were satisfying yourself?

Corporate espionage is potentially more lucrative yes but the opportunities are much less. There are millions of MacBooks out there with significantly more people jacking off in front of them than discussing lucrative corporate secrets

For corporate espionage it is most certainly company meetings which are of interest.

I'm not sure real "jerking face" blackmail is that frequent. If caught the author would face heavy charges. It's probably way easier and less risky to massively scam by pretending you had access to the webcam than to actually bother to hack.

Beside I'm not sure a "jerking face" would be more than awkward if published. A reverse angle in which you could identify what was the video used for the jerking session would be way more compromising.

And in this regard poorly protected IOT surveillance cameras have way more evil potential that webcam in my opinion.

My Mac Mini has neither :)

Why especially in Macs? Were there any particular horror stories?

Any story about Apple gets about 50x the hype because it’s a more understandable brand and set of products. The only other OEM that has any story traction is Lenovo, because China. Nobody knows what a Dell Latitude 43675b is.

There’s nothing notable or worse about the Apple issues. If anything, they are probably a lower risk than the average PC.

There where a lot of horror stories about random people spying on "you" through mac webcams. Like in the sense that they hope to capture NSFW material and similar.

Most of this stories where not actually happening, I don't remember exactly but I think they came from a single story of targeted hacker attacks where such a thing actually happened and then people got blackmailed.

But it's was more comparable to some rumors which wildly spread and then many non technical people ended up believing and which somewhat had a truth at it's core somewhere so it's not easy to just put it of as "mad up".

Also it happened like a 5+ years ago, it just stuck with a lot of non tech people somehow. And it (normally) doesn't hurt so tech people aren't that likely to tell people that this isn't quite right. It's often already hard enough to convince them to do any privacy focused actions.

Maybe that's misguided and naive, but I pretty much trust my phone to protect me from bad actors taking over the camera; I'll have to trust the apps I use that have camera access to not spy on me, but those are few.

Until relatively recently, any userspace app on my computer could freely access the camera and microphone, including background processes and malware, so that feels a lot riskier. There seems to be a permission for this that must be granted in the newer macOS versions, but I assume there might be ways around that.

My thoughts exactly. On my phone, I have to trust Apple. On my laptop, I have to trust everyone who wrote code I downloaded. That’s two quite different crowds.

Then you haven't seen all the malware and spyware on phone apps that have been approved by Apple and Google right? I don't trust anyone regarding my tech as far as I can throw them.

I could have a System 76 machine with latest xyz hacker proof Linux distro and I'd still assume all was heard and listened to through that device. Just makes no sense to trust any mass production device.

This might be true for yourself as a technical savvy person. Camera covers are particularly important to people who are self-aware enough to realize they don't have the tech skills to keep bad actors from gaining access to their camera

As a tech-savvy person, I definitely don't have the skills to make sure of that on a laptop. I might be one brew install obscure-util-from-random-HN-comment (or npm install ...) away from inadvertently giving away all my privacy.

I'd also add that my laptop camera is pointed at me[1], and has a decent view of most of my room, whereas the vast majority of the time my phone's camera is pointed directly at my desk or straight up at the ceiling. I'd find my laptop's camera being compromised far more intrusive.

[1] Or least _was_, until I disconnected it - I needed to replace the screen anyway, and I _never_ used the camera, so I just popped the camera out at the same time

There will always potentially be bugs. From only three months ago and featured on HN at the time: https://www.wired.com/story/hacker-apple-safari-webcam-bug/