What if someone was watching you right now?
Well, I hope no one is.
But on that note, we live in a time where cyber bullying is as serious (or even more) than the typical high school bully. If any of you know even the slightest about the deep web, then you know that your tech is very easily hacked.
Black mirror episodes do enough to scare you about the gadgets you use, and your laptop’s camera is no stranger to that.
Some use adhesives, some use sticky colourful sticky notes, while others buy fancy little sliders on Amazon to cover their laptop’s camera. I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg does it, then I feel like so should you.
But then again, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t exactly a role model for privacy… is he?
Macbook
Back when the macbook was relatively new in our lives, every new Mac user’s argument was “yeah but Macbooks can’t get viruses, bro“. I would know, I was one of them. I’m sorry.
But back then I clearly didn’t freaking love smart gadgets as much as I do now.
As many macbook and non-macbook users know, one handy tool of the laptop is that when your camera is turned on, there’s a little green light next to it that reassures you of that.
This was one advantage we had over Windows users; if someone hacked our cameras, we would at least know thanks to our handy green light.
With cyber crime being so common and frequent in our day to day, I hope you understand that it is fairly easy for a hacker to disable the green light and still be able to watch you eat ice cream and cry before bed. At 3 in the afternoon.
Oversight
So I stumbled upon this nifty little app and I can’t stress how useful it is.
Oversight is a mac monitor that constantly checks on your mic and webcam: always alerting you whenever your internal microphone is activated or any process accesses your webcam.
As far as your microphone goes, you never really know if it’s activated unless you’re recording yourself and play the audio back to see if you did record something or not.
As far as your webcam goes, regardless of if you open an app that triggers your laptop’s camera or not, Overwatch will always alert you of its use.
There are several useful little perks to this green umbrella that sits in your mac menu bar.
- Say you aren’t being hacked but your Facetime app opens for some weird reason, not only will Overwatch tell you the exact app that has triggered your camera (in most cases), but it will also let you allow or deny the use of it.
- Overwatch lets you know if your camera is being used even if the green light doesn’t come on.
- You can “always allow” certain apps instead of Overwatch asking you permission each time.
- Say you’re recording something for a legitimate source, but that legitimate source has been hacked by another outlet that is indeed stealing your information, Overwatch has got you covered too.
- Yes, it’s free.
You can get your hands on this life saver right here –> Overwatch.
There are instructions on how to download (which is child’s play really) and use, so you’re all set there.
Let me know if you end up using it!
