I've blocked the camera on my MacBook, iPad, and iPhone by placing a band aid over them. I've turned off Face Time, if I need a camera, I just remove it.
@Freya Yes, I did that too, for years... and still can... but it does not address the mic, which is, I believe, more of a threat to privacy than anything. I am not conversant w/ Mac, but both Win and Droid are natively designed to listen anymore, and the software that governs that is a monkey-knot...
So I just wrote a little gizmo to shut the mic off at the driver level (disables the driver), and in normal operation, if I do turn it on through the app, will automatically shut it back off after a length of time - I have that set to 5 minutes). I can turn it on indefinitely,, which I do for Skyping, as an instance, but in that case, the app is visible and always on top in the corner of the monitor... Until I manually disengage the drivers again.
This worked so well that I included shutting the cam off too, under the same method. so now, cam and mic come on at the same time, and shut off the very same way.
I dunno yet, but I will probably be releasing it as beta later this summer... Right now it is a hack... I need to make it universal for joe-six-pack to use.
Now I know, when I plug my phone into my car, I can use Siri to do things like change radio stations, make calls, tell me the weather and use the gps. Weird! it's over Bluetooth. She'll even read any texts I may get while I'm driving but that I don't do.
Yeah... the phone is the tough one. I am really new to owning a smart phone. And I do not like that it listens. Right now I do not have the 'assistant' going, so I think I still have to push on the little mic icon for it to be listening, but that is nowhere near good enough.