If Apple makes such high-end stuff, and is marketing on privacy, why can't they spring for hardware switches? Pine64 does, and they're by no means high-end. Not by price, anyway.
Better yet, Lenovo has a little plastic cover built into the camera under the lens.
I don't need to trust the implementation of some switch, I can physically cover up the camera with a nicely integrated cover. No trust required for about 0.01¢ of plastic.
Apple's old iSight webcams had a white iris that opened and closed by twisting a ring at the front of the camera. It was very nicely built and you could see whether the iris was closed from across the room.
I can physically see that there is opaque plastic covering the camera lens. I don't need to trust in the hidden implementation of a LED or switch or anything. I can physically verify that the camera is disabled - meaning no trust.
I don't think the price of a hardware switch would be a concern for Apple, but the size would. A hardware switch would take up space. Apple broke their keyboards to shave a couple millimeters of thickness off their laptops.
The Pinebook Pro uses a key combination, managed by the keyboard firmware. That's not quite as good as a hardware switch, but it shrinks the attack surface considerably.
I always used to say I don’t cover the webcam on my MacBook Pro because any hack sufficient to activate it without my knowledge would mean the attacker already has root, including my bank login, etc, and I’d just be closing the barn door after the horses have left.
In the Covid era, however, my threat model is no longer unlikely malicious actors with root , but more plausible bugs in my conference software. I’m not worried that a statistically implausible attacker has a zero-day on my webcam, but that Zoom has a bug that will default the camera to on despite my settings as I join standup coming out of the shower. If there were a firmware-based gesture to explicitly turn the camera on, I wouldn’t need the tape.
Not necessarily. Apple owns the patent for a camera cover made of the privacy film that turns transparent with a switch; why they haven’t used it is beyond me.
You still have a silent mode toggle on your iphone. I think apple can figure out how to add a hardware switch for a camera/mic to a laptop without compromising thickness.
It doesnt need to be a hardware cover, just a hardware killswitch to the circuit.
Well, I can't speak to Apple's intentions, but consider they did the same thing with their laptop touchpads as they did the iPhone button. The touchpad used to actually depress, now it just vibrates to simulate feedback.
(Thinking about this again, past the edit window—no, it's more than three parts. There's the (1) sleep/wake button, (2) (3) the two volume buttons, (4) and the vibration motor. And I guess (5) the speaker too, not sure if it counts. Still, it's not many.)
