(Not an answer) This is an amazing questuon, and you are absolutely right to be suspicious of usung software to do this!

Oh, thanks mate. I've always been suspicious of things like that, but since a person close to me started working with cyber security, the horror stories have been really "scaring me straight".

If you were someone incredibly important and worth snooping on, I guess someone might bother to write some kind of malware to interfere with it.

It would be difficult, but it's a possibility.

I'd probably be more concerned about the mics though, webcams just don't provide that much useful information to be worth snooping on.

Even if you had a wall full of secret CIA plans on the wall behind you while you were working, chances are your webcam has such shit resolution that they won't be readable anyway.

And of course if your camera has an activity LED on it that shows when it's turned on, that is impossible to disable via software since it's part of the camera's power circuitry. As long as the camera is on, the LED is on.

It'd be really obvious to the user that the camera was on.

So to snoop on you effectively, they'd need to find a way to mess with the webcam disabling software, then install their own snooping software, then disassemble the laptop to physically remove the LED on the webcam and put it back together again.

And all that trouble just to see a 720p grainy image of your face, which is probably plastered all over social media already?

I guess if you were Joe Biden it'd be worth doing, but for the rest of us it's really not worth anything.

So yeah if you're incredibly paranoid, don't trust it. But really for the 99.99% of us, there's no valuable info that can be obtained from a webcam image of us that will make that worth doing.

That is a fair point you make. I just worry because I tend to walk around naked, so I'm a bit paranoid over pics of my schlong going around.

Didn't Dell (or someone) create a laptop that had a huge security flaw in its webcam that allowed people to 'hack' into it pretty easily? There was a website (on clear net, surprisingly) that was a roulette, allowing you to stream from some random persons webcam from that line of laptops.

I put a paper over it and taped my laptop camera.