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> The camera is engineered so that it can’t activate without the camera indicator light also turning on. This is how you can tell if your camera is on.

Is this verifiably true? I trust Apple on security matters more than the average laptop maker, but the fact that so many of these indicator lights are software-controlled erodes my trust in basically all of them.

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This [1] is the best source I've seen. 2008 era Mac laptops definitely had that exploit, but since then they've made hardware changes.

> All cameras after that one were different: The hardware team tied the LED to a hardware signal from the sensor: If the (I believe) vertical sync was active, the LED would light up. There is NO firmware control to disable/enable the LED. The actual firmware is indeed flashable, but the part is not a generic part and there are mechanisms in place to verify the image being flashed. […]

[1] https://daringfireball.net/2019/02/on_covering_webcams

Yep, for a decade Macs have been shipping with indicator lights hard wired to camera power.

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