Every electronic communication device (laptop, mobile, tablet, etc) should have 1 hardware switch per sensor (camera, mic, motion/acceleration, etc) which disables the sensor.
Why manufacturers still haven't introduced this is beyond me.
>Why manufacturers still haven't introduced this is beyond me.
Expense and lack of demand.
Some older laptops used to feature hardware kill switches for the wifi (this was prior to the advent of a camera in every laptop). The old Dell D820 model was one such laptop. Eventually they were dropped all around because from the makers point of view, the presence of the switch had no effect on the sales of the laptops.
Anything you add to the BOM (Bill of Materials) for the device raises the final net cost, and there is still enough competition in the laptop/phone space that keeping the costs down is necessary to compete. Additionally, twenty-five cents per unit does not sound like much, until of course you multiply that by 10+ million units built (where a twenty-five cents difference per unit amounts to $2.5+ million difference in the end). So if having the switch or not having the switch made no difference in sales, the maker could either raise their profit, or lower their price (or more likely split the difference) by dropping the switches.
The lack of demand is that not enough purchasers are telling manufacturers they want hardware on/off switches (the purchasers do this by buying only laptops with them, and by not buying laptops without them [which may be difficult to bootstrap now, given that almost no laptop has a hardware on/off switch anymore]).
I've found many of those supposedly 'hardware' wifi kill switches were software controlled (When I installed Linux on an old Dell, it completely ignored the state of the wifi switch).
I want a switch that physically cuts power to a device, but no... :(
Why manufacturers still haven't introduced this is beyond me.