MY WEBCAM COVER, MY SELF
The best I had on hand that day was a hot pink mini Post-it note, sized to flag a few lines of reading, and colored to catch the eye. My roommate needed one too, I told her – and so did everyone else who asked what’s that covering our webcams. The adhesive on the Post-it lasted longer than the boyfriend. And in the world beyond, the tech-privacy panic has ballooned. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg – whose messaging app reportedly records users’ conversations to better target ads – has tape over his own webcam and headphone jack, as we learned from a photo he posted in 2016. That was after FBI director Jim Comey admitted to covering his own laptop camera, back when he was still the country’s top counterspy. In 2013, federal investigators hacked webcams to track a suspected terrorist in Texas and media coverage of the Bureau’s methods of creeping – they call them “network investigative techniques” – probably popularized webcam paranoia more than it deterred crime. Like trend-obedient college girls, terrorists worthy of the title will have been covering their cameras for years now. Everyone’s doing it these days . The conspicuous shields we wore on our webcams in school shouted what’s become a commonplace conviction . But now that we all know they’re there, I think we can admit the webcam watchers have their subtle charms, too.
A crude state of nature takes hold when a person thinks no one’s watching... Work- from-home types might consider un-taping their cameras. Welcome the webcam hacker, as a reminder to put on a clean shirt, lay off the nose-picking, and think twice before kicking the cat. For me, it’s the only lasting association from a dalliance that feels longer ago than it was. Fluorescent pink will always remind me of this secondhand surveillance-conscious self- confidence, a mix of appropriate paranoia and perverse pride that says: I’m worth spying on – and I know it ! The laptop I’m typing on now has its webcam sealed with an adult-professional version of the same. It’s a slim, black, plastic stick-on contraption that opens and closes as needed. The woman to my right at a DuPont coffee shop has the homemade version – Scotch Tape and a scrap of paper. The man on my left side has none. But it’s different for men. They’re still less likely to be webcam-hacked for the benefit of voyeurs, and therefore less vulnerable – except, of course, to blackmail. For a man to cover his camera sends the unseemly message that he’s a profitable target for a reason he’d rather you not know, some secret proclivity he might pay to keep hidden. To save him the embarrassment, Hewlett Packard’s latest laptop comes with a sliding webcam cover built in. Alice Lloyd is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard .
But suddenly I had license to believe there could be thousands of watchers whenever I was in front of my open laptop – which was most of the time – more
time than I’m visible through my actual windows.
American Consequences 67
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