How to turn off the camera on Mac computers to improve privacy

Nowadays, making a video conference is quite common, but you don’t always want to share the image. If this is the case for you, there is a way to prevent any current application from accessing the camera on your Apple Mac computer. We show you how to do this and significantly improve your privacy. One of the additional positive things of following the steps that we are going to indicate is that you can carry them out at any time, so you do not have to execute them before accessing the application (it is even possible to carry them out in the middle of the call so that stop seeing what’s in front of the Mac’s camera). Come on, that is a most useful possibility. Prevents the use of the Mac camera in a call We are not going to indicate that in each of the current applications there is a button with the image of a camera that allows you to activate or deactivate the hardware. Unfortunately, options are beginning to be released in apps that allow administrators to control the uses of this hardware. Consequently, what you will do is establish the control on your own computer. In this way, it will not matter what software is used: you will always have control. Turn off the camera if you use a web service In this case what you have to do is take advantage of the options offered by Apple’s Safari browser. This is what you have to do to disable the Mac camera if the connection is made with web clients: Open the Safari browser and, in the menu that it includes, you must choose the Preferences option. Among all the tabs that appear in the window you see on the screen, you must choose the one called Websites. Next, you will see that there is a section on the left called Camera. You will check that each website you want or can access the camera, click on the desired one and select Deny in the drop-down on the right. You will have finished. Prevent an application from accessing your camera These are the steps you have to take on your Mac if what they use are specific developments to hold a video conference, such as Slack or Teams. Do the following without skipping any steps: On the computer desktop, select the Apple menu and, there, you must access the section called System Preferences. Among the possibilities here, you must choose Security and Privacy. The next thing is that in the four tabs that you see in the pop-up window, select Privacy. Click on Camera in the left area and, on the right, you will see all the applications that demand the use of the camera. Disable the ones that won’t have access to it (as you can see, the action is completely reversible). You’ll be done. With these simple steps you can significantly increase the privacy you have when using a Mac computer because you will be the one who controls access to the camera and not the applications. And this is always important. >