A reader asks: “Is it enough to disable the camera driver for my laptop, and to block the lens?”

Reader Steven Clifford Cohen asks: “I disabled the driver for the camera on my laptop. I also put tape over it. Is that enough?”

Enough to prevent video-based snooping, sure. But opaque tape alone would do that; a camera can’t see through an opaque object, period.

However, if you’re really worried about remote-snooping, consider the microphone, too; with its own audio drivers, and its own physical components.

And if you’re really, really worried about remote-snooping, consider that there are enough non-obvious ways to snoop that you might want to crawl inside a Faraday cage and close the door behind you. For example, researchers have found ways to use the vibration-sensors in hard drives as microphones. (See Researchers Turn Hard Drives Into Covert Listening Devices.)

But the odds of being randomly snooped by a video or audio voyeur are pretty remote. It might be different if you’re a public figure, or are involved in some activity or dispute that might tempt others to specifically target you for snooping; but for normal people in normal circumstances, simply blocking an unused lens is probably more than sufficient security against this type of snooping.

(PS: If you’d like something a little nicer than tape, you can buy sliding plastic webcam privacy covers for around a buck or so each; examples.)

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