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Comment by bb123 | Hacker News Reader

That’s fair enough but you have to accept you’re in the huge minority there. The average consumer does not want to have to flip a switch for every microphone on their devices when they want to use it. Not to mention the reliability implications of adding more moving parts and dust/water ingress points. There has to be a trade off between usability and security.

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My teacher wife and a bunch of the folks she knows (non-nerds) cover their webcams with stickers or whatever. They’d all love (separate!) kill-switches for their cameras and mics. Plus everyone working in tech I know. So that’s... everyone I know who’s aware their laptops have cameras and microphones.

Not for mics, but you can essentially add the equivalent of a webcam kill switch with something simple like this: https://www.amazon.com/C-Slide-Sliding-Computers-Chromebooks...

My company's IT department has said in passing that they've had many cases of laptop screens being cracked by those sliding webcam obscurers.

I think you're overstating your position.

If all of those people had to flip a hardware switch every time they wanted to use their phones, they'd complain about it.

Not phones, but for tablets and laptops I think a lot more than just privacy geeks would like a way to know for sure they won’t accidentally transmit video or audio, and would put up with a little annoyance for the peace of mind.

On a laptop it may often be once in a lifetime.

Depends on your laptop. My Mac laptops ring when someone calls my phone in another room.

The problem is, as soon as security expert "Barbara from Facebook" posts something about the NSA still watching you because the switches don't really do anything you're back at square one. :)

So, the device comes with a slide switch, set to on. A user who cares can slide it off.

It's not that simple. People will accidentally set the switch to off and won't understand why their mic doesn't work anymore. At this point there is a good chance they will call support.

This also happend with the hardware wifi kill switches we used to have on notebooks.

Since we’re integrated between OS and hardware on Apple platforms, they could implement a “Turn on your microphone” dialog. I think this support excuse is too commonly used, when there is obvious value in the result. He’s not a minority, even my grandparents shared the photo of Mark Zuckerberg saying “If this guy hides his camera, so should you”...

You already have dialogs on macOS like "app X wants to use the microphone, allow?"

God the number of times people complained about their laptops being broken only to find out they'd turned WiFi off. Either through a separate kill switch or through a function key. It was a pain the arse.

I recently installed linux on a MSI laptop that has a webcam function key switch. For some reason (could have been me), it was off and I just assumed that the camera wasn't working with linux, or that there was a hardware issue. I almost sent it back. I never owned a laptop with that kind of switch before, so I wasn't looking for this, and the keyboard icon [1] looked like some kind of screen contrast button to me...

[1] https://imgur.com/a/2Oe2k4e

Oh man, this happened to me many years ago as well with wifi. The keyboard had a wifi toggle (which in linux translated into rfkill) as a mod to an Fn key. Took me hours to realize that was a thing. I was literally debugging the kernel trying to figure out why the driver was spitting out "rfkill enabled" when "it shouldn't" only to realize a simple hold of Fn + F9 (or whatever it was) fixed the problem right up :facepalm:

It is that simple. The computer can prompt "MUTE" just like TVs do

That's a little different. Wifi is an invisible feature, and it can become disabled through no action of yours. Cameras are physical, so you can make it really obvious when it's enabled and when it's not. You just look for the physical obstruction. Apple's first iSight camera, for example, had a cool leaf shutter that you opened or closed by twisting it.

I know lots of people who have had trouble getting their wifi to work. I don't know anyone who put a piece of tape across their camera and then couldn't figure out why their camera didn't work.

It’s Apple. If you want switches on your computers, use ThinkPad or Dell.

The latest ThinkPads have a physical/mechanical switch, but just for the camera... The mic can not be turned off with this switch...

Just a warning (I don’t know the specs of that ThinkPad) but just because it’s a physical switch doesn’t mean it actually physically disconnects the device.

It's called ThinkShutter and it physically covers the camera lens.

so it doesn't turn it off, it just puts some plastic in front of it. Plastic that is easier to break then something inside the case that will cut the power. While I am a big fan of the idea of the thinkshutter and friends, a real switch that cuts the loop to the cam/mic is a better option.

I think a physical shutter is superior, if only for peace of mind. If the lens is covered, nothing else matters.

I'm of the same opinion. I keep one on at all times, especially for those moments when someone's teleconferencing software turns on camera by default and I'm not in a work-safe outfit or environment.

Even the user that cares can sometimes forget to do it. With Apple solution you'll never forget to switch microphone off, but on the downside, you now have to trust Apple.

After months of zooms and many #PoorJennifer moments I'm sure that the number of us with camera covers will increase

Anecdotally even my old 69yo father who thinks Google Chrome is the same as Google.com has covered his webcam with tape and bought a laptop with a mic hardware switch so I really don't see this as a usability problem in 2020.

What do you mean with "flip a switch for every microphone on their devices"? Why would you want to have more than one mic and one switch per device? And turning it on in hardware is way faster than in software so a hardware switch is both faster and more secure and breaking a hardware switch seems a lot less likely than custom OEM made software failing or stop getting updated. Dust and water is no problem as lots of phones already have hardware switches, including my Android phone. I really see no problem in hardware switches at all.

> What do you mean with "flip a switch for every microphone on their devices"? Why would you want to have more than one mic and one switch per device

The ipad has 4 microphones. iPhones have at least two. They’re located in different places to either catch different sounds or implement noise canceling

Clearly anyone sensible would have a single switch for all of them.

Would turning on a single microphone of the array have any meaning?

Since iPhone microphone quality is well below market average maybe it would improve?

Once such compromise is PilferShush Jammer for Android/Windows. There might be a similar iOS version, but I haven't found one yet.

Android. Also on Play Store. https://github.com/kaputnikGo/PilferShushJammer

Windows 10 app. https://appforwin10.com/pilfershush-jammer-app-for-windows-1...

Actually, I have not though about this before, but now I want it.

It totally makes sense, and in the modern world too many people put covers on their cams for this not to be considered a valuable feature.

There used to be such flip switches for Wi-Fi, so it is not too far-fetched.

I doubt this is the case.

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