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Comment by livre | Hacker News Reader

> Designed to protect your privacy, Mac notebooks have a camera indicator light to let you know when the camera is on. ...

The main problem with that isn't that it is possible to disable the LED. The problem is that the LED is like a smoke detector, when it alerts you it's already too late, you are on fire (or your photo/video has already been taken). An indicator LED doesn't protect your privacy, it only tells you when it has already been breached.

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...and it only tells you that if you are looking at it at the time.

Indeed. Think of the “American Pie” situation. Laptop open playing Spotify to get you in the mood, then bop, on goes the camera thanks to a bug in zoom. Are you going to notice?

The problem with a physical cover is that if the bad guys can install software on your computer that can access the camera without setting off the LED they can also install just about anything they want. At that point nothing on the computer can be trusted.

How is thisa problem with the hardware cover? It's a problem with the security model in general.

On new Macs the light is a minimum 3 seconds even for a single frame photo. Anyone monitoring you has to turn the light in just to see if you are there, and what you are doing, and will likely have to watch for hours to catch any incriminating footage.

You will have plenty of notice.

And what sort of hardware switch is it that guarantees the 3 second minimum?

A capacitor?

A capacitor would also mean that you could quickly switch the camera on and off without triggering the light.

> will likely have to watch for hours to catch any incriminating footage

It's not just 'incriminating footage' that's the problem. There are perfectly legal sites I visit that I'd prefer didn't have a photo identifying me. Takes only seconds to snap such a picture if using an exploit like the safari one in April.

They can take a photo of you, not the web site.

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