Despite what you read on Hacker News no amount of encryption or software trickery is going to stop this.
Have you heard of this?
Video demonstration https://youtu.be/ZZ5HS8GWIec?t=1m45s
"IN THE AGE of surveillance paranoia, most smartphone users know better than to give a random app or website permission to use their device’s microphone. But researchers have found there’s another, little-considered sensor in modern phones that can also listen in on their conversations. And it doesn’t even need to ask."
The commenter you're replying to would be better off giving his money to a company that puts privacy (and FOSS) above all else, instead of trying to bribe a lost cause (let's not forget about the 3 times Lenovo has been caught with nasty factory-installed malware on their consumer laptops).
Here's the Librem laptop homepage: https://puri.sm/products/
It's not dumb to take whatever precautions you can.
And people do worry about having their pictures taken. Remember the scandal when a school took pictures of children undressed at home with their laptops' cameras?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbins_v._Lower_Merion_School...
We can speculate about whether the tech exists, but read their guide to securing your Red Hat box and decide for yourself how good they are at publishing defense against attacks they won't tell you about: https://www.nsa.gov/ia/_files/os/redhat/rhel5-guide-i731.pdf
I'm no way trying to defend his agency's actions on encryption - it's chilling and probably one of the most important and defining issues of the information age. Only adding this to point out that people are complex and not black and white and their motives and beliefs and actions can sometimes be in conflict and cognitively dissonant.
1 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05...
AFAIK the airbag accelerometers are designed to detect much larger accelerations than e.g. the ones in a smartphone, and are thus essentially completely insensitive to anything lesser than a huge impact -- spurious airbag inflation is one of the things the manufacturers really, really don't want to happen.
Many of them are just mechanical switches actuated by a weight, with no active electronics (makes sense for such a safety device to be as simple as possible): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWSlwhYyOhI
And even when not impacting anything, a car is not exactly a quiet and vibration-free environment either...
http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-961237-0403-QuickCam-Messenge...
10+ years ago they basically defined what a webcam is (search "webcam icon" and observe the symbology --- appropriately eyeball-shaped), and they don't have any indicators.
"iSeeYou: Disabling the MacBook Webcam Indicator LED"
https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2...
The FTC just made an announcement about SilverPush, an example of such software:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2016/03/ftc-i...
On one hand, you want to (in my world) empower developers and let them take ownership of ... whatever. On the other hand, you want to learn, as a group how to do better. On the gripping hand, you want to be able to tell the customers (and investors) what to expect and when.
It seems as if you can do the combination of #1 & #3, somehow, without tracking what you are doing and how you are doing it, but that #2 requires us to baseline what we are doing and try to brainstorm about what we can try in an attempt to, as a functional group, do better.
In your world, measurement is "bad" for an individual's autonomy. And it may well be. How does an organization accomplish goal #2 (and #3) along with #1?
Anecdotally, I found that the self-directed process improvement (PSP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_software_process) helped a great deal. I didn't go overboard with formalism, just jotted myself some notes along the way during the week that I spent 20 minutes compiling on Friday, but I found that I had to record what I was doing to even know what I was doing. And that's just me. Maybe I'm an idiot, but I really didn't know. And my own estimates of what I was doing were ... surprisingly off.
