The practice, however, doesn't prevent a computer microphone from being owned.
According to officials tasked with keeping the US homeland safe, tape should be the first supply atop everybody's safety list.

Tape made its modern-day US security debut in February 2003, when the George W. Bush administration raised the terror alert level to "orange." The Department of Homeland Security soon urged Americans to have plenty of duct tape and plastic sheeting on hand to seal their windows in the event a "dirty bomb" was discharged.

Today, that leftover tape can now help us stave off a webcam hack—at least an attack that secretly films unsuspecting computer users. That's what James Comey, the Federal Bureau of Investigation director, said Wednesday. In April, he told Americans that he puts tape on his webcam. Now it's your turn.

"There’s some sensible things you should be doing, and that’s one of them," Comey told a conference at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Wednesday. "You go into any government office and we all have the little camera things that sit on top of the screen. They all have a little lid that closes down on them. You do that so that people who don’t have authority don’t look at you. I think that’s a good thing."

The recommendation comes after years of webcam hack reports, from the high-profile attack on Miss Teen USA to the FBI themselves wanting to use the technique to spy on hackers (both of those incidents date back to 2013).

Tape probably won't stop a nefarious hacker from listening to you, however. And toward that advanced goal, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has also covered his computer microphone with tape. However, there's still no consensus among security experts about how effective that measure is, because adjusting a microphone's gain may still allow attackers to pick up ambient sounds.