Who's smarter, you or [the people behind] your 'Smart' device? Details?

I have tape over the mic and camera on my laptop. I should make a dummy phone plug to totally disable the mic.
Every person I work with – and we are all “engineering types” has their camera covered and we all did it independently.

I would do the same with my smartphone. I’d use peel off window stickers to cover the offending orifices.

The accelerometers can figure out what you are doing anyways. (Source) They’re even good enough to do handwriting analysis.

@LuckyGuy Try covering your accelerometers!

@jerv That is an excellent paper. I see that they are trying to add the video and audio to the mix to become even more accurate. Wait. It won’t be long before they start searching for “humping frequency”. I wonder when users will start pushing back and demanding true control of their camera, mic and accelerometers.

From the paper above:
“Based on these results obtained using only the motion sensor, future works
plan to add the other sensors to increase the classification performances. We
expect that adding further information from the camera and the microphone can
help considerably in discriminating between activities like “standing”, “talking”
and “workingPC” or “walking” and “walking up/down stairs” activities where
the biggest confusions are present. Moreover, we plan to extend the set of human
activities in order to address the problem of short-term and long-term human
behavior based on the accelerometer and video data.”

Honestly, I’d not heard of people covering their microphones.

My desktop has no microphone, or cam, and I don’t have a smart…anything.

It’s not that I’m a technophobe or that I’m advocating that as an answer. It’s just that my needs are simple and my internet mighty slow (satellite) anyway, so I’m slow to step up to the latest and most abused advances. I know one day I’ll adopt ‘smart’ technology and I hope to be smarter than it is.