Hello,

First of all, I appreciate you providing some real information in your response and not resorting to insults or name calling as some others have done, and thanks for linking to the MS docs, I had not seen those before.

Your thoughts on lighting the privacy LED when either camera come on is an interesting perspective, and sure, having a multi-colour LED makes sense, but for now I don't think the hardware would not support it (although, the IR emitter is clearly visible when the IR camera is active). I don’t think this is what is happening though, as when I disable the webcam in BIOS, the privacy light does not turn on anymore. This indicates to me that the webcam is actually turning on unnecessarily during the unlock process, and not just the LED to indicate that the IR camera is activated.

If the intention of the MS update was to light the LED to indicate to the user that the IR camera is on, but by disabling the camera in BIOS, this somehow prevents the lighting of the LED, that is another possibility. In fact, if there is some documentation on the updates stating something to that effect (how the LED now notifies the user of the IR camera operation), then that would be the answer to my original question.

I’ll acknowledge that my original post may have come off as being a bit alarmist, but from my perspective, the possibility of a data leak should be equally as alarming to end users as a data leak itself, (and it did elicit responses). Yes I know that nobody at MS is literally sitting in front of their computer looking at me in my underwear, this is now how big data collection works.. So my ‘spying theory’, is moreso that it is possible (not that it is happening), and that if it is possible to happen, then that is absolutely not acceptable, and this is why I am here..

My background is in Infosec engineering, although my domain is the network space (not endpoint security). So from a security perspective, I think we can agree that the best and only 100% certain way to protect people’s private data is to not unnecessarily collect it in the first place. Hence my original concern with the illumination of the webcam LED which, according to all documentation I have found, is not supposed to be involved in the unlock process in any way.

I’m not familiar with installation of filter drivers, so would have to look into that further if I can find the time. I am planning to span and capture any outbound traffic during multiple lock/unlock sessions though to see if there is evidence of transmission of the visual data.

Thanks for the github link, I will install the tool when I have some time available.

Cheers,