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.
