At that stage though all bets are off - the hackers have access to everything you have typed, all your files, all the audio from your microphones, your credit card details, those photos of you and your partner on the hard drive...

Yet the camera on a laptop is the thing that we need to cover? It’s a weird security model, that’s all.

Besides, on a MacBook it sounds like the webcam light is almost impossible to circumvent because of the implementation.

For those photos of you and your partner you made the conscious decision to take them, perhaps even weighing the risks of them being compromised at some point. This is very different from a video feed being captured of you unknowingly. That goes for both the impact of such a compromise, and the feeling of the risk of being watched.

Almost impossible just means it requires lots of money/dedication, but still a T2 chip compromise is scalable and can be done remotely, which is fundamentally different from physically compromising hardware.

Well Purism laptops have hardware switches for the microphones too.

But it's not even just for hackers. Zoom had the SUPER annoying habit of turning your cam on when the meeting organiser selected that everyone should cam.

This led to several colleagues being unaware they were being shown at that time. One was even lying in bed and called in from her phone. That's her business, it was 8pm at her location. But now everyone knows.

A hardware slider would have prevented all of these real-world problems.