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>>xairy+(OP)
I am not a hardware engineer or anything of the sort. My laptop has a slide shutter over the webcam, but this obviously does nothing about the microphone. How difficult/error prone would it be for the power signals to the microphone and camera to be individual wires/traces and have a physical switch that breaks the power or data connection physically? Surely these are very low voltage so the switch could be like the iphone mute switch?

>>Eavolu+la
The Framework laptop does this for both microphone and webcam, and there are privacy focused Android phones which also have a microphone switch which cuts the power to the microphone. It's definitely possible.