Manage permissions

Is there any way to manage permissions like which app can access your camera, microphone etc and which app can’t.

There are probably a lot of ways to do that but I don’t know of a universal easy way to do it. Here are a few options I can think of.

  • You can run applications in a firejail and restrict what they access to.
  • Applications installed via flatpak/snap are sandboxed and there are some limited permissions you can apply to each application. However, it isn’t very granular.
  • There is an application in the AUR called cameracontrol-bin which supposedly does this. As I have never tried it myself, I can’t testify to it’s effectiveness.

There are probably more ways as well.

GNOME has some settings for this, but I’m not sure which applications can be limited this way.

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You’d need to try it for the specific applications you have installed to see how it behaves.

Another alternative is to disable the camera in the BIOS or blacklist its kernel module (so the driver doesn’t load). You can possibly also disable the microphone in the BIOS, but you can also control the audio card settings to make it output-only, e.g.

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