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Plastic webcam covers—especially of the sliding kind—boomed in popularity sometime in the 2010s as a low-tech way to keep hackers from eavesdropping on compromised machines. The concern felt justified at the time. But by 2020, Apple was beginning to issue warnings that those covers aren’t actually needed and can even damage a MacBook’s display.
For this Security Bite, let’s set aside our tin-foil hats and talk about how webcam covers don’t meaningfully improve privacy, could cause features like True Tone to not work properly, and are far more likely to damage your screen than stop someone from spying on you.
Green light indicator myth
On more modern Macs—those with Apple Silicon and Intel (post-2008)—a malicious hacker can’t turn on your webcam without also triggering the green privacy indicator. The camera module hardware doesn’t allow it.
Macs produced before 2008 are a different story, though. Security researchers at Johns Hopkins published a 2013 paper showing that Macs released prior to 2008 could, under certain advanced attacks, be coerced into powering the camera without the green LED indicator. It makes sense considering back then, Apple tied the camera sensor and indicator together with software.
However, this changed in late 2008, when Apple redesigned the camera module so the sensor and the green light share the same physical circuit. This way, the camera couldn’t receive power unless the LED did too. Fast-forward to today, and there’s still no known malware capable of bypassing that hardware design, likely because there’s no software to compromise anymore.
There’s also a neat tool called OverSight, created by Apple security researcher Patrick Wardle of Objective-See, that alerts you whenever the webcam is active. This is useful as some macOS malware will even wait until you’re away from your Mac before trying to activate the camera, so tools like this help expose that behavior.
Paper-thin screen clearance
Apart from the danger to privacy, there’s also a danger of seriously cracking your MacBook’s screen.
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