I'm sure some of you know that if your laptop comes with a built-in webcam, you can use it to take a picture of someone as your computer boots up and sends the image to a server. But, finding a reliable service or having a server to upload the images to can be a problem for some people - especially if the thief is not near an internet connection.
In my opinion, having a computer with a login password may be useful to prevent someone from logging in and taking information easily, but with a few hacks they'll get in eventually and be able to take all your information, in which encryption is useless.
So, lets just say you are the only user of your laptop, and you have a working built-in webcam. If you were to have your computer log in automatically, my idea is the webcam would take a picture of you and with facial recognition it would automatically shut down if it didn't see you as the current user. Use this with a tracking system and you may be able to find your laptop without any harm being done to it.
Unfortunately I don't do much programming, so I can't develop something like this. I hope someone reading this post can develop it, or knows someone who can.
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