You can buy/print and stick a physical «webcam cover»[1] manually on your notebook or phone.
My current notebook, manufactured in 2023, has very thin bar on top of screen with camera, so I need a thin, U-like attachment for the switch, which is hard to find.
Am I the only one that is not worried at all about the camera and super concerned about microphones ? The camera may see me staring into the screen, woo hoo. The microphones will hear everything I discuss, incl. confidential information.
There is no physical microphone cover there, is it ?
Well i have Pinebook Pro and it's pretty much abandonware, pine doesn't do any software and OSS lacks maintainers, nobody want's it, e-waste laptop. Take it as you will.
Don't they warn you on the product page that you are buying hardware that is fully reliant on the community for functionality? That's the reason it's so inexpensive
Yeah, that's nonsense. Pinebook Pro is well supported by Linux kernel and you can thus put any aarch64 Linux distro on it. And it's been this way for the last 3-4 years at the very least.
I've been using it daily for 3 years for watching movies and main notebook while traveling.
> I suppose still not ready to be a daily driver to replace my normal phone?
I'd say that depends on your definition of daily driver and/or how much compromises you're willing to take. I occasionally see members at my larger hackerspace running around with those or other seemingly "unfit" hardware and not complain too much about it ;)
I have an old iPhone 7 which has an audio IC issue and the microphone is physically disconnected. Calls don’t work, video records without sound etc. need to connect an external microphone to have one.
Apart from the inconvenience it was somehow liberating knowing there is no microphone physically active.
And the true or not Google or other apps listening then you see ads based on that conversation. I think it's true since far too many times obscure things I've spoken about appear in ads soon after the conversation. So yes I'd say a mic blocking feature you can confirm is working, blocking, is needed.
Recommendation engines work on vast amounts of data they have on you and whatever made you speak about thing X was likely preceded by your internet activity which is not very unique as a precursor to speaking about X. In other words, if other people do Y on the internet and then end up doing stuff related to X, the recommendation engine will show you X just because you also did Y.
The other explanation is one of your contacts who were part of the conversation did things that either directly related to thing X, which you spoke about, or something the algorithm see other people do that relates to X, and you got shown ads based on your affiliation to this person.
I've also worked at FAANG and never seen proof to such claims anywhere in the code, and with the amount of people working there who care about these issues deeply I'd expect this to leak by now, if this happens but is siloed...
> I think it's true since far too many times obscure things I've spoken about appear in ads soon after the conversation
People have been making claims like this since at least the early 90s, about TV then, and no one ever credibly claims to have worked on something like this. I've worked with purchased ad data and I've never seen this data or anything that implies that it exists. It seems far more likely that its a trick of memory. You ignore most ads you see, but you remember ones that relate to odd topics that interest you.
I agree with this sentiment, people talk about x product then realise they are seeing ads for x product. Most likely the ads were there first and the people only start talking about it cause the ads have been working.
That’s pretty much it. You see an obscure ad without realizing it and have a related conversation later. Then when you see the ad again and make note of it, it feels strange.
Yeah, we're well past a point where "phones" have NPUs powerful enough to locally process "sensor" input and produce decontextualized probabilties of potential interests.
It's going to happen sooner or later and people will accept it, just like they accepted training of AI models on copyrighted works without permission, or SaaS, or AWS/PaaS, or sending all their photos to Apple/Google (for "backup").
I really question the commercial value of that kind of data. Credit card data has a lot more to do with intent to make future purchases than any keyword you might spit out verbally or in a search engine.
Reminds me of the chrome bug I filed years ago that is still unfixed. An extension with access to all browsing tabs can open a hidden iframe to a website that commonly would have mic and camera permission (like hangouts.google.com), and then inject its own JavaScript into that hidden iframe to capture mic or camera.
For this to work hangouts.google.com had to not include the HTTP header to block iframing but thankfully if you make up a URL the 404 page served on that domain does not include that http header.
Just a personal anecdote: I don't have a dog, but my grandma has two. Once, while visiting her, the dogs were barking a lot. Almost immediately I started receiving ads for dog food in my cellphone.
It is more likely your GPS placed you in the vicinity (regularly?) with another AD ID that regularly searches for, purchases, or visits dog centric locations. It's also entirely possible that the other AD ID's (your grandma) dog food schedule is predictable and you happen to be visiting within a time frame of dog food purchases.
The camera privacy issue arises because teenagers and college kids often have their computer in their bedroom.
So a webcam hack that lets them watch my 16 year old daughter study would also let them watch her sleeping, getting dressed, and making out with her boyfriend.
It's not only a teenager or college kid issue. I've seen adults with a computer in their bedroom because it's a kind of private space where they don't expect anybody to inadvertently bump into it.
My laptop is in my bedroom in winter, right now, because it's one of the smallest rooms and I can heat it easily. I use it in other parts of the house in the other seasons. I do have a sliding cover on the camera. I bought it years ago. The main issue is the microphone.
When I have to do faux-2FA auth using numeric codes sent by text or email, I sometimes catch myself quietly saying the numbers. A microphone would by quite handy for an attacker, even if they couldn’t see all my network traffic.
A picture of you with the subject "I know what you were looking at when I took this picture of you" is pretty good blackmail--I think there's an active campaign doing this even.
This would've been blackmail 20 years ago.... nowadays it's just "of course you know, I shared my OF likes publicly", will not even raise an eyebrow; or perhaps I'm living in too bohemian society circles
I received a phishing email from this campaign or a similar one several months ago.
The email opened with my name and contained a Google Maps photo of a house where I'd lived 8 years before.
The author claimed to have hacked my laptop and captured videos of me doing embarrassing things. They would release the videos unless I paid them $1000 in Bitcoin.
I searched and it's an extremely common scam, but I did panic for a few minutes.
As someone who often speaks gibberish to myself due to ptsd, if someone recorded me in my room they could convince anyone I am utterly insane, beyond any hope. It is a great way to blackmail people with coprolalia or other verbal tics.
And yeah, if they had access to my webcam, they would just see a guy staring into the screen or walking back and forth in the room.
Eh, random utterances are more common than you think. Especially amongst older people. Most will know at least a couple family members who tend to mutter random things to themselves.
Nobody who is themselves sane is going to judge another for random crap they say when they think themselves alone.
If there is a discrete PA in the speaker path, then not. But I would not be that surprised if there is a single chip codec + PA combination that can conect an internal ADC to pins that are primarily meant as PA outputs of the integrated PA.
"Am I the only one that is not worried at all about the camera and super concerned about microphones ? The camera may see me staring into the screen, woo hoo. The microphones will hear everything I discuss, incl. confidential information."
All phones are suspect. We should go back to only carrying pagers.
Just to note: Apple will refuse to cover any screen damage under warranty if one of these sorts of things was in use.
I would not be surprised if the same is true for some other manufacturers, too, but I can only speak definitely to Mac.
The issue is that lids close too closely + tightly now, and so anything more than a piece of tape winds up focusing all the pressure applied to the closed lid on that one spot in the glass, since the cover winds up holding the display slightly off the base of the laptop when in the closed position.
I find that the sticky part of a post-it works very well for this. Sometimes you have to clean the adhesive part off with 70% IPA, but not too often.
Not as pretty as a custom cover but cost-effective and can generally be done in under a minute with common office supplies (post-it + scissors) which has its own advantages.
My current notebook, manufactured in 2023, has very thin bar on top of screen with camera, so I need a thin, U-like attachment for the switch, which is hard to find.
[1]: https://www.printables.com/model/2479-webcam-cover-slider