Off means off

From Vendors must start adding physical on/off switches to devices that can spy on us by Larry Sanger.

Where’s my webcam’s off switch?

Have you ever noticed that your webcam doesn’t have an “off” switch? I looked on Amazon, and I couldn’t find any webcams for sale that had a simple on/off switch. When I thought I found one, but it turned out just to have a light that turns on when the camera is in use, and off when not—not a physical switch you can press or slide.

The “clever” solution is supposed to be webcam covers (something Mark Zuckerberg had a hand in popularizing); you can even get a webcam (or a laptop) with such a cover built in. How convenient! I’ve used tape, which works fine.

But a cover doesn’t cover up the microphone, which could be turned on without your knowledge. Oh, you think that’s impossible? Here are some handy instructions. Or maybe you’ll say you’re not paranoid—it’s not a serious problem? Don’t be so naive, said the FBI seven years ago (they’re worried about predators stalking children), and the Atlantic, and USA Today more recently. The issue isn’t going away. With hacking skills growing more common, the problem has surely grown, if anything, more dire.

Another “clever” solution is to use a software off switch, like this (for Windows). But it simply turns your webcam’s driver on and off. Of course, it’s not too hard for a sufficiently skilled hacker to turn your driver back on and start recording you without your knowledge.

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Your phone has the same problem, you know

Tape over the webcam? Covers to disable the functionality we paid for? Why on earth do we go to these lengths when hardware vendors could simply sell their products with off switches? The more I think about it, the more I find it utterly bizarre. Don’t these companies care?

I’ve just been talking about webcams, but let’s talk about the really horrible spy devices: your smart phone. Oh, your Android phone can’t be hacked? Here are some handy video instructions, viewed over 300,000 times and upvoted 1,100 times. Surely not your iPhone? Don’t be so confident; hackers are very creative, as (for example) the Daily Mail has reported, and besides, Apple is proud of its patent allowing remote control of iPhone cameras.

Besides, it’s been known since at least 2014 that the NSA had developed, as early as 2008, software to remotely access anybody’s phone.

And yet there isn’t a hardware off switch for your phone’s camera and microphone, short of turning the device entirely off (but there’s an app to turn the camera off). A device equipped with a hardware “off” switch for the camera and microphone isn’t yet on the market, as far as I know. Purism is making one.

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But, as I already said, it’s a hard, cold fact that hackers and government and corporate spies can and sometimes do turn our cameras and microphones on without our consent. This isn’t controversial and, for anybody who is slightly plugged-in, shouldn’t be surprising. Security experts have known that, for many years, regardless of the intentions of hardware vendors like Logitech and Apple and large software vendors like Skype and Snapchat, the hardware, firmware, and software that run our devices just are susceptible to hacking. It’s just a fact, and we are right to be concerned. So these companies are responsible for building and selling insecure systems. At a minimum, they could be made significantly more secure with a tiny bit of hardware: the humble “off” switch.

A major social concern that is frequently shown to be justified (privacy and security) with a 2 cent solution (a physical kill switch) which is not implemented because vested interests (tech companies and state surveillance) need us to be vulnerable.