What feels like a self-inflicted issue though is that the switches are fail-open, not fail-closed.
To allow for swappable bezels, the switches (on the plastic bezel) in fact just introduce obstructions in optocouplers (on the camera board screwed to the metal lid), which—I don’t know what they do due to Framework’s refusal to release the schematics, but I guess just cut the power line of the camera resp. the signal of the microphone using a couple of MOSFETs.
The problem is, the camera and the microphone are live if the obstruction is absent and disconnected if it’s present, not the other way around. So all it takes a hypothetical evil maid to make the switches ineffective is to pick up the edge of the bezel with a nail (it’s not glued down, this being a Framework) and snip two teensy bits of plastic off to make the switches nonfunctional while feeling normal. This is not completely invisible, mind you—the camera light will still function, you’ll still see the camera in the device list if you look—and probably not very important. But I can’t help feeling that doing it the other way around would be better.
I vaguely remember another vendor (HP?) selling laptops with a physical camera switch, but given the distance between the switch (on the side near the ports) and the camera (on the top of the display), I’m less than hopeful about it being a hardware one.
To allow for swappable bezels, the switches (on the plastic bezel) in fact just introduce obstructions in optocouplers (on the camera board screwed to the metal lid), which—I don’t know what they do due to Framework’s refusal to release the schematics, but I guess just cut the power line of the camera resp. the signal of the microphone using a couple of MOSFETs.
The problem is, the camera and the microphone are live if the obstruction is absent and disconnected if it’s present, not the other way around. So all it takes a hypothetical evil maid to make the switches ineffective is to pick up the edge of the bezel with a nail (it’s not glued down, this being a Framework) and snip two teensy bits of plastic off to make the switches nonfunctional while feeling normal. This is not completely invisible, mind you—the camera light will still function, you’ll still see the camera in the device list if you look—and probably not very important. But I can’t help feeling that doing it the other way around would be better.
I vaguely remember another vendor (HP?) selling laptops with a physical camera switch, but given the distance between the switch (on the side near the ports) and the camera (on the top of the display), I’m less than hopeful about it being a hardware one.