Friday, October 17, 2014

Camera bearing laptop?

New laptop has one.  It's buried in the bezel, it only can see out when the lid is raised.  All it can see is my smiling face when I am using the machine.  There is an app to take a selfie for use as account photo.  I have much better selfies I took with a real camera on a tripod.  If there is an app to do video conferencing with it I haven't found it.  I cannot image using it to take pictures the way you do with an Ipad or a real camera. 
   I suppose it's there 'cause it's so cheap as makes no matter.  A couple of bucks for a chip, the lens is molded into the bezel so that's basically free. 
   There is a LED that comes on when the selfie app is running the camera.  I wonder if the LED is hardwired or software controlled.  Could an embarrassment app take a pix of me in my underwear and keep it secret by not turning on the LED?  Not that I work my computer in my underwear very often; it's too cold around here for that.
   Anyhow, to satisfy my paranoia, I placed a bit of masking tape over the lens.   Just in case NSA or KGB wants pix of my kitchen table. 

3 comments:

DCE said...

I do roughly the same thing: unplug it. I have a desktop, hence the external camera and microphone. That's the other reason I unplug the webcam when I'm not using it: malware could turn on the microphone and record or send whatever is said in the office to someplace/someone else. The same is true at work.

I have warned my son about the buolt-in camera on his laptop and he covers it when he's not Skyping his siblings or girlfriend.

Dstarr said...

Will Skype do video calls? Right now I don't know any apps that can. I guess new laptop has a mic built in somewhere, but I haven't found it yet. Not that I have looked for it very hard, but still.

Evan said...

You can use Skype and google video chat - works fairly well. In my office we use other programs to let us see each other's ugly mugs.