Right? I was about to post this exact same thing. It seems like automating the shutter control kind of kills the entire point of having a shutter: a solid manual control of the usage of the camera. I guess it is a bit better than just an LED as at least you can look at it and know its open or closed (can't trust the LED to always light) but nothing is preventing it from opening up when you're not paying attention, grabbing a quick picture, and closing back up before you notice.
What's with all the people being so paranoid about the camera?
The person who has access to your computer has access to everything else but the camera. Your purchase history, porn you watched, messages. Are you trying to say that out of all of that the video is the worst offender in your life?
Just because you have access to the camera doesn’t mean you have access to all those other things. The exploiter could still be sandboxed within a browser tab or specific application container.
And just because people are paranoid about the camera doesn’t mean they aren’t also paranoid about those other things.
The person with access to my camera has access to observe the environment my computer is in. My WFH setup is in my bedroom - I don't want to be paranoid that my company (or a random IT employee at my company) can use my computer as an incognito candid camera at a whim by remotely activating it and suppressing any visible indications that it's activated.
Manual shutters ensure that you definitively know if it's even _capable_ of viewing/recording you. Automated shutters at least can provide re-assurance at a glance if it's active (or capable of being activated) at that point in time. An indicator light that may or may not be capable of being manually suppressed means you have no reassurance at all about whether you're being visually observed any time your laptop is open and powered on, which can be stressful.
I can shut it and turn it off at night when I'm not working to provide reassurance that it can't record me when I'm not working, but my room is a shared space where there are plenty of things that happen in it while I _am_ working that I wouldn't want captured, such as my SO in bed behind me if I start work before she gets up, or her coming in to change during the day or get dressed after a bath/shower.
The abrupt shift to WFH over the past year is likely one of the drivers of it being such a hot trend for business laptops. Many people I know and work with have don't have dedicated home offices, and have similarly resorted to repurposing shared spaces to work from (bedrooms, dining rooms, living rooms, etc), and likely have similar concerns about maintaining their personal privacy as much as possible.
There was the case (in Pennsylvania IIRC) of a remote admin actually engaging the camera remotely on school-district owned laptops located in minor students' homes. You could imagine that those minors had an absolute right to privacy in their homes and might not have much of anything secret or private on those laptops.
I think it's more about preventing user error. It's easy for legitimate apps to suddenly start recording on laptops/desktops when you're not expecting it.
One example is when you're waiting for a video conference to begin, you don't want the camera to suddenly turn on when you're not ready for it.
I like there to be an explicit action before I allow recording. For smartphones there's a permission model where I have the ability to explicitly grant permission every time an app wants to turn on the camera.
However such a stringent permission model doesn't exist on desktops/laptops, so a slider is a simple low-tech solution to the absence of a sufficient software permission model.
Someone being able to remotely turn on my camera anytime during the day or night to spy on and record my family is much more concerning to me than them getting my purchase history.
