Recently we have seen so many news articles about how a hacker was able to capture the video or pictures of a compromised computer through the inbuilt webcam. This is why you should turn off the camera when you are not using it in your PC. Some of the computers make it extremely easy to switch off the camera as they have an on-off flip switch, but in other computers you have to turn off the camera through the operating system settings. Fortunately the new version of Windows – Windows 10, does not make it very difficult to disable the camera for all the apps.
Here is how you can disable or turn off the camera in Windows 10:
- Click on the Start button and then select Settings from there.
- In the Settings window that opens up, select Privacy.
- Under the Privacy category, choose Camera from the left side.
- To turn off the camera, click or touch the on-off flip switch on the right side under Let apps use my camera.
- Instead of turning off the camera for all the apps, you can also turn it off for selected apps that may use the camera. A list of all such apps is given in the same window.
Turning off the camera ensures that nobody can accidentally snoop into your room, take your pictures, or make your video through your camera while you are busy doing something else. And Windows makes it very easy to disable the camera completely for all the apps or only for selected individual apps.