Disabling Web camera

Question

My Eee PC comes with a Web cam, which I never use. How can I ensure that it is effectively disabled, so that no software can use it?

Answer 1

modprobe -r uvcvideo should remove the webcam module temporarily (without the need for reboot). You can add that to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf to make it permenant. Please check whether the above command works before adding.

uvcvideo is the module for my Linux. Yours could be different. Try running lsmod | grep uvcv if you face any problems.

Answer 2

Run:

gksu gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Add

blacklist uvcvideo

at the bottom. Save the file and quit the text editor.

Answer 3

You can disable the kernel drive module responsible for it, which is most cases is uvcvideo. The modprobe let's you enable and disable kernel module, therefore, you can disable your webcam like so:

modprobe -r uvcvideo

And enable it again like this:

modprobe uvcvideo

You can also check whether or not the module is actually disable looking for it using lsmod, which shows the status of modules in the kernel.

lsmod | grep uvcvideo

The output should be similar to this when the module is enabled:

uvcvideo               98304  0
videobuf2_vmalloc      20480  1 uvcvideo
videobuf2_v4l2         24576  1 uvcvideo
videobuf2_common       49152  2 videobuf2_v4l2,uvcvideo
videodev              225280  3 videobuf2_v4l2,uvcvideo,videobuf2_common
mc                     53248  4 videodev,videobuf2_v4l2,uvcvideo,videobuf2_common

And when it is disabled no occurrences to uvcvideo should be returned from the command.