bwik

redefiler said:

apple ][ said:

I have this one friend that has been taping up the camera lens on all of his devices for more than a decade at least.

I always thought that that was kind of paranoid and a bit extreme, but who knows, maybe not. Maybe he was onto something there.

Little piece of black electrical tape on cameras is standard procedure in studios.  

Microphone is difficult to fully disable without monkeying/destroying internals.
You can reroute it System Prefs to the line input, and even plug a dummy cable in,
but in a dystopian future of OS backdoors, would be hard to completely neutralize internal mics.

Once you get decently experienced at database work, you realize it is just an article of faith that the government is not fully scraping your communications, including voice, all financials, and perhaps video, for further analysis.  And likely corporations do the same thing, although they at least face some legal liability for doing so.

The fact is that it is technically possible and not terribly difficult to do.  So, where does our faith lie?   How do we feel in our hearts?  There's no reason to really argue about technical matters because it's increasingly feasible and inexpensive (and you could never reasonably figure out whether people are watching your movements).

Let me even put a truly crazy third paragraph in.  If we allow AI to watch and listen to everybody all the time, it will know how to manipulate and then potentially kill us.  So yeah, good evening.