Precisely. It's a privacy issue, beyond everything else. I just don't feel comfortable with the feeling that someone else may have access to my private life/data/information, etc., without my permission and without any right to do so.

this is precisely why I was seperating covering a webcam from other privacy issues. There are many ways I could be profiled and a handful of ways I choose to protect, or not protect, myself from them. A webcam's not going to tell anyone anything they can't get from turning my phone microphone on, doing some traffic analysis at any point in my communicatios chain or any number of other things. My own government already has a file on me with information about my whole life which I gave them in return for letting my work for a company who provides them with goods and services.
Like I posted earlier, I cover my laptop (and tablet) webcam but I don't cover my phone webcam, for my own reasons. In the vgreat scheme of things a webcam is full of data but very little information.

^ Confusing.
Sounds too me a little like "If they have 5 data on me they might just as well get the pack"; but maybe that's not what you meant.

Considering the current hype of Big Data & AI - the fact remains: Computers can gather a lot of information from faces and movement and (I think most importantly) your visible surroundings. Combine all that with your other data they already have, geographical location, time of the day... it makes me shudder.

But I'll shut up now since I'm starting to repeat myself and it's clear that our opinions differ.

I mean that I'm on CCTV for about 16 hours a day. My webcam only gives information as to whether I am using my laptop.

The surveillance value of any given device's camera is not solely in the photographs it can capture of that device's owner. Far from it.

OK, so what is this mysterious information that somebody could gather from views of the inside of my home?

Well for one thing, they could know whether or not you're actually at home.

It could capture other people around and near you - and using facial recognition software, instantly identify those people and you will find yourself unwittingly associated with them.

As with the other thread on "private search engines", it really depends on whether you trust the authorities to do the right thing and not find a "suitable suspect" by gathering geolocation data and a person who was in that place at that time matching that description.

I have a "healthy distrust" of being under surveillance. I accept that when I am out in public walking down a street, that it's now unavoidable in this country, but in my own home, I prefer not to willingly facilitate being bugged/recorded/filmed.

If you'd have said back in the late 1990s that in 20 years time, almost everyone in Western Europe and the US, not to mention China, Japan, South, Korea, etc, would be walking around carrying a web connected "video camera", microphone and GPS tracker, who would have believed you?

And more to the point, if you told someone in the late 1960s that videophones would not only be a common-as-muck reality in the 21st century, but they would not be the size of arcade machines, but drinks coasters.

Except, of course, that the fact my laptop is on and connected to my home network pretty much tells them I'm home.
It's Extremely unlikely, to the point it's irrelevant that they'd see anyone I associate with through the webcam. They'll already know who I communicate with anyhow.
This was my point in seperating this from the general surveillance idea. Email and traffic analysis would be a 16:20:09 more luikely to give information about me that an uncovered webcam.

You betcha. I only have one laptop with a webcam and don't even enable it.