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Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

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Re: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

#11

Post by duxup »

This seems like a pretty mild warning for folks who might stick a bulky cover on their camera and press down / pack their laptop tightly and now have wedged part of the screen open with the cover.

I'm a fan of using painters tape.... pretty low profile, easily removed, stays on really well. Also the weird blue glow you get when the camera is on tells you pretty quick "Hey there's a cover on there" where sometimes with the all blackout covers ... I can't tell.

I renew my calls for all devices to have an led indicator (good on Apple here) and a physical switch that cuts power to mics and cameras for all devices with them. With the endless layers of software we have today, I have trouble trusting anything but cutting power.

Re: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

#12

Post by roland35 »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #4

When I moved to Germany I was surprised how everyone taped the camera on their laptops with these small, thin, easy to remove stickers that left no residue made for bookmarking your notebooks. This should still work on Macs as a sticker is thin enough not to damage the display.

As long as it's thinner than a standard page of printer paper, according to apple at least!

Re: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

#13

Post by anuragsoni »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #6

Half of my office has camera covers, honestly at this point I'd have a lot of respect for any maker who had a physical mechanism to their camera... Sort of like the original iSight https://www.coolsmartphone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/is...

Lenovo gets pretty close. Most thinkpads starting from 2018 have a thin plastic cover to block the camera [1]

[1] https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkShutter

Re: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

#14

Post by _bxg1 »

People are suggesting just using tape, but the issue is when you want to un-cover it frequently (which is probably more common now than a few months ago). For a couple dollars you can get a thin, nice-looking little plastic cover that you can actually slide out of the way when you need to use it. Most of these are thin enough not to be a problem, but they vary, and even the really thin ones usually don't quite let your Macbook close all the way, potentially putting pressure on a narrow point.

Re: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

#15

Post by etaioinshrdlu »

> The camera is engineered so that it can’t activate without the camera indicator light also turning on.

Has anyone torn down the hardware and verified this lately?

It should not be a complicated feature at all. Just ensure you have the same voltage applied to your LED circuit as your camera circuit, and enforce that by having them on the same wire...

Re: Don't close your MacBook with a cover over the camera

#20

Post by gtm1260 »

I was very skeptical of the camera covers, but then through conversations with some of my co-workers, I realized that they weren't being used because people were worried about spies secretly turning on the camera. It was 90% of the time just peace of mind that their camera was actually off, instead of having to find the sometimes hard to see options in video chat programs etc.
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