HN Explorer

Strange Google Hangout Phenomenon

13 points by amakaruk ↗ HN
Why does my laptop's camera light briefly turn on after making a phone call using Google voice? It's a simple phone call that doesn't use my camera, so why does the light flicker on briefly afterward?

Does anyone else experience this?

14 comments

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dctoedt
This confirms the good sense of covering the camera lens when not in use. For example, I've long stuck a narrow strip of paper, torn from the adhesive part of a Post-It note, to my MBA's camera lens, removing it when making a video call.
nomercy400
or disable your camera device/driver in windows? if you are using it so little that you want to cover it, you might as well disable it.
enjo
Can't replicate calling from either the Chrome extension or from within gmail.
amakaruk
That's interesting. I'll make a video and upload it.
ChiperSoft
My guess is that when the plugin initializes, it connects to the camera to confirm that the previous settings are still valid and then disconnects once it sees that video isn't needed.
mylons
takes a picture of you to store along with the metadata it sends to the NSA?
jagawhowho
Shame you are being down voted after the prism program has been made public. This is not as unlikely as it may sound.
mylons
agreed -- i wrote it to sound tin foil hatty, but to come off as funny. mission not accomplished
[dead] ossreality
Lol. It's because your webcam has a mic and hangouts is initializing.

this is the stupid nonsense that passes for hn posts. wow

nextweek2
This is your camera lighting up when it polls for its resolution, many cameras lie about their resolution so the most reliable way to know is to grab one frame. Mine does the same with that and other software.
lutusp
> Why does my laptop's camera light briefly turn on after making a phone call using Google voice?

It turns out that the current Hangouts defaults to the video call mode, even if the user intends to use voice only. So the camera gets activated even though it's not going to be used.

One workaround is to disable Hangouts and revert to the old setup, the one where you placed voice-only calls from within Google Mail. I do it this way simply because I don't have any contacts who do video calling.