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Mark Zuckerberg Tapes Over His Webcam. Should You? (theguardian.com)
Remember when FBI's director James Comey was spotted using a piece of tape over the camera on his laptop? At the time, Comey noted that he started doing it after he saw a person "smarter" than him do it as well. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apparently also puts a tape over his webcam. Zuckerberg posted an image on Facebook yesterday, celebrating Instagram's big milestone of hitting 500 million monthly active users. In the background, we can see that his laptop has a tape over the webcam, as well as something around the microphone port. From a report on The Guardian: Even experts who don't cover their cameras think they should. Why doesn't Matthew Green, an encryption expert at Johns Hopkins University? "Because I'm an idiot," he said. "I have no excuse for not taking this seriously ... but at the end of the day, I figure that seeing me naked would be punishment enough." While Zuckerberg probably does have any number of advanced persistent threats trying to break his digital security, normal people shouldn't be too complacent either. Installing backdoors on compromised computers is a common way for some hackers to occupy their time.On an unrelated note, it appears, Zuckerberg uses Mozilla's Thunderbird as his primary email client.
This story is utter manipulative bullshit. Propaganda.
The story encourages people to irrationally displace their urge to take action by suggesting an easy act of resistance.
It basically tries to delude people into thinking they are in any way resisting mass surveillance by encouraging them to engage tangibly with the idea by covering up their camera when not in use, or at least imagine that surveillance can be resisted by such simple and pointless measures. It's a blatant psychological trick.
You should not feel better about your privacy because you tape over a camera. Even if video data of you is being collected continuously most of that information is completely worthless compared to everything else that with absolute certainly is being collected and processed.
Of course the important video data would come from when you are actually using your camera....try covering it then....
You should be absolutely OUTRAGED that this kind of toxic thinking and blatant psychological manipulation is being shoved in front of your face if you have a single basic unit of free will and intelligence.
But then you should also be organizing into independent unions and threatening to strike to cripple the economy until the appropriate referendums can be held to abolish mass surveillance and tyranny in general. But hey, that takes a lot of confidence in your perception of society. I guess you're excused from your duty to your family, your community, and your country because you let your self esteem get worn down to nothing by constantly deferring to "experts" on every matter.
I'm using Linux, so it probably doesn't work, anyway ;)
(serious: I suppose this actually IS possible on Linux, but any cases in the wild?)
Not too likely. Most people can't get their own camera to work properly on Linux. ;) If some malware does, Skype should hire him!
I use foam tape - that way it also buffers the lid, something that many laptop manufacturers have skimped on.
For most machines, I also make sure I disable the audio drivers in the kernel, and rebuild without them. My main laptop can still be used with an external microphone through the high-def audio driver, but not through the built-in microphone that uses an intel-snd driver that isn't in my kernel. That's probably fairly good protection against being listened on, even if not perfect.
Posting to undo a bad mod
A band-aid is optimal. No adhesive will get stuck on the lens. Also, you can personalize the band-aid. Mine has Hello Kitty on it.