Publication Details

Title: Somebody’s Watching Me? Assessing the Effectiveness of Webcam Indicator Lights
Author: R. S. Portnoff, L. N. Lee, S. Egelman, P. Mishra, D. Leung, and D. Wagner
Bibliographic Information: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15), New York, New York
Date: April 2015
Research Area: Networking and Security, Usable Security and Privacy
Type: Article in conference proceedings
PDF: https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/networking/somebodyswatching15.pdf

Overview:
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.

Acknowledgements:
This work was supported by the Intel Science and Technology Center for Secure Computing (ISTC-SC), NSF under award CNS-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.

Bibliographic Reference:
R. S. Portnoff, L. N. Lee, S. Egelman, P. Mishra, D. Leung, and D. Wagner. Somebody’s Watching Me? Assessing the Effectiveness of Webcam Indicator Lights. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15), New York, New York, April 2015