How to tell when an Android app is secretly accessing your camera or microphone

Android makes it easy to find out if any apps are using your device's camera or microphone, even if they try to use them surreptitiously in the background.In this short guide, we'll tell you how to find out if any apps are using your camera or microphone, how to find out which apps they are, and how to stop them from doing so again.

Android's privacy indicator appears in the status bar

In Android, when an app tries to use your device's camera or microphone, you'll immediately see a green indicator in the upper-right corner of the status bar.If you see a green dot here, then you know an app on your device is using the camera or microphone.

For more details, swipe down to open quick settings, then tap the camera or microphone icon to go to your device's security and privacy settings.From here, you should be able to see which apps have recently used the camera or microphone on your Android device.

To stop the app from doing this in the future, just tap it and tap Remove permissions for this app.Alternatively, select "Manage Permissions" and set camera or microphone permissions to "Don't Allow".

Please note: the exact settings will vary depending on your version of Android, but the green indicator will appear on all versions.

Although this green dot should appear in almost any app that tries to listen or spy on you, you should know that it won't appear when Google is listening for your "OK, Google."

Google introduced these privacy indicators in Android 12, so you just need to update your Android device and make sure you're running Android 12 or higher to get this feature.

Tweak app permissions to make Android more secure

Among the millions of apps in the Google Play Store, there are always some malicious apps that try to gain unwanted access to the camera app or microphone.Fortunately, Android makes it very easy to thwart these attempts by revoking camera or microphone permissions for any unwanted apps.