Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.

Some Rules

Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
Don't promote proprietary software
Try to keep things on topic
If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
Be nice :)

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Is it unnecessary to cover one's webcam on Linux? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

54 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Cross-posted to: https://sh.itjust.works/post/15859195

From other conversations that I've read through, people usually say "Yes, because it's easy on Windows", or "Yes, because they simply don't trust the webcam". But neither of these arguments are enough for me. The former I feel is irrelevent when one is talking about Linux, and the latter is just doing something for the sake of doing it which is not exactly a rational argument.

Specifically for Linux (although, I suppose this partially also depends on the distro, and, of course, vulnerabilites in whatever software that you might be using), how vulnerable is the device to having its webcam exploited? If you trust the software that you have running on your computer, and you utilize firewalls (application layer, network layer, etc.), you should be resistant to such types of exploits, no? A parallel question would also be: How vulnerable is a Linux device if you don't take extra precautions like firewalls.

If this is the case, what makes Windows so much more vulnerable?

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

If I had a nickel for every time I bought a privacy slider for a laptop that already had one, or one with a hard-to-notice hardware switch. I would have 2 nickels which isn't a lot but it's weird it happened twice.