How To Disable Microphone & Webcam in Ubuntu
Today we will teach you how to protect yourself from these types of threats in a practical way.
In this tutorial, we will use Ubuntu 16.
How to Disable or Enable Ubuntu Microphone
First, we will see how we can disable the microphone in Ubuntu 16.
For this we will use the GNOME hike mixer tool which we can run from the software center or install it from the terminal using the following command:
sudo apt install gnome-alsamixer
Once the packages have been downloaded and installed, we proceed to execute the tool and we will see the following:
We can see that the tool automatically detects the device that performs the task of the microphone and allows us to edit various values in it.
To disable or activate the microphone in Ubuntu we must go to the Mic tab and leave the Silence checkbox checked and uncheck the Grab box.
The tool will automatically save the changes. If what you want is to enable the microphone, it would be the reverse of what was commented.
How to Disable or Enable Ubuntu Webcam
For this task, we must add the webcam driver to the “blacklist” of the system and for this, we must edit the file blacklist.confusing the preferred editor, in this case, we will use the following command:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
There we must add the driver associated with the webcam which is called uvcvideo, for this, we go to the end of the file and add the following line:
blacklist uvcvideo
We save the changes using the key combination: Ctrl + O
And we left the editor using the combination: Ctrl + X
If what you want is to enable the webcam in Ubuntu, it would be the opposite of what was commented. Now, if what we want is to temporarily disable the webcam but not definitively adding it to the blacklist, we can use the following command:
sudo modprobe -r uvcvideo
Using these simple methods we can protect our integrity and privacy from attacks directed at communication devices such as microphones and webcams in Ubuntu 16 and in this way we avoid being preyed upon by unscrupulous people or with harmful purposes.
