There where a lot of horror stories about random people spying on "you" through mac webcams. Like in the sense that they hope to capture NSFW material and similar.
Most of this stories where not actually happening, I don't remember exactly but I think they came from a single story of targeted hacker attacks where such a thing actually happened and then people got blackmailed.
But it's was more comparable to some rumors which wildly spread and then many non technical people ended up believing and which somewhat had a truth at it's core somewhere so it's not easy to just put it of as "mad up".
Also it happened like a 5+ years ago, it just stuck with a lot of non tech people somehow. And it (normally) doesn't hurt so tech people aren't that likely to tell people that this isn't quite right. It's often already hard enough to convince them to do any privacy focused actions.
Most of this stories where not actually happening, I don't remember exactly but I think they came from a single story of targeted hacker attacks where such a thing actually happened and then people got blackmailed.
But it's was more comparable to some rumors which wildly spread and then many non technical people ended up believing and which somewhat had a truth at it's core somewhere so it's not easy to just put it of as "mad up".
Also it happened like a 5+ years ago, it just stuck with a lot of non tech people somehow. And it (normally) doesn't hurt so tech people aren't that likely to tell people that this isn't quite right. It's often already hard enough to convince them to do any privacy focused actions.