Somebody's Watching Me? Assessing the Effectiveness of Webcam Indicator Lights

TitleSomebody's Watching Me? Assessing the Effectiveness of Webcam Indicator Lights
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsPortnoff, R. S., Lee L. N., Egelman S., Mishra P., Leung D., & Wagner D.
Published inProceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15)
PublisherACM
Place PublishedNew York, NY, USA
Other Numbers3741
Abstract

Most laptops and personal computers have webcams with LED indicators to notify users when they are recording. Because hackers use surreptitiously captured webcam recordings to extort users, we explored the effectiveness of these indicators under varying circumstances and how they could be improved. We observed that, on average, fewer than half of our participants (45%) noticed the existing indicator during computer-based tasks. When seated in front of the computer performing a paper-based task, only 5% noticed the indicator. We performed a followup experiment to evaluate a new indicator and observed that adding onscreen glyphs had a significant impact on both computer-based and non-computer-based tasks (93% and 59% noticed the new indicator, respectively). We discuss how our results can be integrated into current systems, as well as future ubiquitous computing systems.

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Intel Science and TechnologyCenter for Secure Computing (ISTC-SC), NSF under awardCNS-1318680, and AFOSR under MURI award FA9550-12-1-0040.Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors or originators and do not necessarily reflect the views of its funders.

URLhttps://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/somebodyswatching15.pdf
Bibliographic Notes

Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15), New York, New York

Abbreviated Authors

R. S. Portnoff, L. N. Lee, S. Egelman, P. Mishra, D. Leung, and D. Wagner

ICSI Research Group

Usable Security and Privacy

ICSI Publication Type

Article in conference proceedings