this post was submitted on 10 May 2025
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Absolutely, unless you're lucky enough to have a laptop with a Physical killswitch on your Webcam + Mic module, then it's not needed since flipping the Switch physically kills power to the Camera module's USB header.
Framework Laptops have this Feature.
My Asus has one and I didn't know about it and FOR YEARS I thought my webcam was broken- it wasn't even showing up in the device manager. I bought an external webcam, because I figured it was pooched and I had to use a webcam sometimes, but not often enough to care into looking to get it repaired.
This is a story about me being dumb.
Maybe that's why many PCs these days don't have them, and also why they don't have network kill-switches anymore. People just got confused and thought something was broken.
I'm glad I'm not the only one. I've since been issued new laptops for work that have physical covers built in and I'm a big fan of those, though I know it doesn't disable a mic.
It would give me peace of mind if the switch also slid a cover over the lens. Is there video of people confirming the function of the switch with a voltmeter?
I wish the framework also had a physical switch for the antenna. At least it's made easy to entirely remove and replace the antenna manually - then using an external antenna has the kill switch of just unplugging it, though it then takes up a port.
If you want that too you could buy one of these covers. I haven't seen any videos of it but running
dmesg | grep -i "Camera"seems to confirm that it does cut the connections since the devices disappear.Yeah I haven't seen as many computers with Network/Wireless killswitches, they used to be much more common in the past, so for network cutoff your best bet would probably be to disable or remove the onboard Wifi and use an external Wifi card in one of the expansion slots. Ideally you could use something like this to still have a USB A port but also have a Wifi dongle inside it as well.
I am mostly new to linux and will study on that command.
Regrettably, the camera and microphone switches leave no room next to the lens for the cover in your first link to slide to. I hope a future generation of the screen bezel considers this or incorporates its own lens cover into the camera switch. And thanks for the link to the USB-A/wifi dongle, I hadn't yet checked out what the makers are up to where expansion cards are concerned!