Real question: what's the fear behind people putting tape over their Webcams? It's not that I don't believe they *could* be compromised, but why would anyone want to capture and go through hours of footage of me staring at my computer? My picture is on Facebook it's not a secret what my face looks like.

Preventing potential ai robot clone of yourself with your facial expressions to be created.

@Andrian fair enough, but it feels like you'd have to either capture days of use at a time or get pretty lucky. Still I guess if you can buy a few thousand computers it's likely one will have value.

Accidentally joining video chat with client while still in my undies :-)

@lukebaumann why buy computers ?

A virus can access webcams and use image recognition to filter out interesting stuff, webcams on infected machines are a goldmine for criminals.

Maybe there is some hacker that picked you (maybe he knows you or he found out that you live in his area). Thanks to social media he can find who you are friends with and he will wait for you to do something compromising. Then he will send you message like: "Send me money or i will send this video to your friends/colleagues. Hackers are very creative people and it's not like they want your face. They want your money. It's their "job".

@ItsNotMyFault wow that is cool, are they just looking for credit cards a day such?

@LastDigitOfPi also, the video would usually be of your face/upper body right? Honestly if someone wants to send video of what my face looks like while cumming to my whole contact list (see related post from today) Id rather let it go than give them $450. To be fair though I am a college student which means I have no money and no standards about what gets sent to my contacts

Nowadays webcams and smartphone front cams have a sufficient resolution to get quite some interesting data.
Some hackers showed it's possible to read e.g. a user's pin input from the reflection in his eyes, and if the user wears glasses this gets much easier.

It may also be interesting to know where someone usually is at what time, and seeing that is easy based on the background.

In the end I don't really use webcams anyway so I just put a sticker on it.

I saw it most on people that do shit ton of online meetings and do not want to risk to show their video by mistake

@donnico yeah but presumably when they are actually in an online meeting they have to take the tape off to use the camera

@donnico I'm sorry I misunderstood, you were saying so they don't accidentally turn on their camera and let the other chat participants see them for a second.

@lukebaumann most of the work meetings do not really require people to show their face especially if is somebody that you know no?

Take a look at Black Mirror, there's a very simple example in this series

@LastDigitOfPi
Edit: I am God
Here it is. They should really work on auto shortening these urls in the app https://devrant.com/rants/1138654/...

Im afraid that my mom will find my computer on shodan and see sticky things :(

Mostly because of those "researches" men do. if you know what I mean

Kind of stupid to cover your laptop's webcam. If I where a hacker I would also go for the phone camera. People (not developers of course) spend more time in their phones than the laptop

Image recognition, algos, they dont have to Watch every frame, easy life