enabling my camera driver

a few years ago i disabled the camera driver on my laptop. it was when i was running 16.04 or 14.04, not sure. searches for how to do this were telling me to do modprobe -r but i distrusted that because something getting in to spy on me could reload the driver too easily with modprobe. if they can make a camera spy hack they would know how to load the camera driver. i eventually found or was pointed to a way to disable it at boot time that would need at least a reboot to enable it. but i have forgotten how to do that. i've looked around /etc and /boot but i don't even know what to look for. i thought maybe it was the kernel command line but i see nothing special in there. i want to enable the camera while family is isolating in their various homes. i verified that the BIOS SETUP has no way to disable or configure the camera. any ideas?

i am running Xubuntu 18.04 LTS although i initially set this up on 16.04 or 14.04.

here is a copy of my kernel cmdline:
Code:BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.3.0-42-generic root=UUID=5112a32e-125b-4d32-b2cd-825462d2179f ro quiet splash vt.handoff=1