I always found it interesting people are obsessed with the camera and being watched. Me sitting and typing at my computer couldn’t possibly be interesting for anyone to watch. It’s directional so I’m confident the worst they can do is catch me looking particularly stupid or picking my nose. The microphone however captures all sounds in my environment - and there’s tons of things I don’t want folks to overhear, let alone derive like key strokes. Yet, there’s no effective way to ensure the microphone is physically disabled or ineffective. I couldn’t even tell you where the microphone is on most devices and as Google recently demonstrated whether a microphone is a part of my varied connected devices.
I would honestly be more worried about my screen being captured as I sometimes reveal passwords, look at my two-factor-authentication app, or bank account, messages with friends, vacation bookings, etc.
The Framework laptop [1] has physical switches for the camera and microphone. With some manufacturers already following on the reapairability (e.g. Dell Luna proof-of-concept [2]), maybe this will become more popular as well.
This is interesting. My initial thought is that it would try to uniquely identify the sound of each individual key, then it would apply statistical analysis to map each key to a letter (the letter 'e' should be most common in English).
