Just to follow up, a website has just been taken down which sold spyware for $25 that could take over a target pc’s camera:
So it appears not to have been difficult or expensive to do.
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In the spirit of follow-up, I decided to cover my laptop camera after seeing the responses in the forum here. I still see a huge disconnect between people covering their cameras but not having any qualms about using Alexa, Echo, and other eavesdropping devices, but there’s a lot of cognitive dissonance going on these days, so I guess it shouldn’t be too surprising. Anyway, thanks for your input on this 
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Well, I do not have any voice assistant at home - except for the one on my phone. I don’t want them all over my house
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BTW, for people wanting a fairly safe and easy camera cover, if you have access to post-it style notes, just cut a band from the sticky portion of a post-it note large enough to cover the camera and give you 1/4" or so on either side. It’s fairly sticky, removable when necessary, shouldn’t leave any residue on the laptop or camera and cheap to replace.
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This topic has turned into a completely different one.
Back on topic.
In the 4 or 5 years I have had my samsung laptop I think I may have used the camera twice.
I prefer voice only as I can wander around with a mic and not have to sit at the PC.
We don’t have any voice assistants, even on our phones. In fact, my wife came to me last year and asked me to de-Google her smartphone. As it was a Huawei Android phone, it was fairly easy to disable everything but Play Store.
We use Firefox for browsing, DuckDuckGo for search etc. We use Signal for messaging anyway and Office365/OneDrive for photo storage.
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Now now… You’re not a Google team player 
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