Windows 10 & 11 · camera and microphone · lives in your tray
Your webcam can be switched on without the little light ever blinking — and your microphone never had a light to begin with. Blindfold names the app the second either one opens, and stays out of your way until something does. Enjoy yourself. You'll know if anyone's peeking.
Opens in the Microsoft Store.
When you need it
You closed the window an hour ago. The client didn't close with it, the camera and the mic stayed open, and the only warning was a dot in the taskbar that came and went while you were looking at something else.
Remote-access tools, "monitoring" software, whatever an employer, a flatmate or an ex set up one afternoon. None of it appears in the Start menu, and all of it reaches your webcam through exactly the same door Zoom does.
On a great deal of hardware that indicator LED is driven by the same code that drives the sensor rather than wired to it. And the microphone, which hears the whole room, was never given a light at all.
What it does
Not "an app". Which app — by name, by executable, on which camera or microphone, and for how long. Blindfold reads the same signal as the privacy dot in your taskbar, and it names the real culprit rather than a Windows service.
Blindfold checks who signed the program and says so plainly: signed, unsigned, or wearing a name that normally belongs to somebody else. A name you don't recognise is one click from a search that explains it.
Something starts using your camera or your mic and a quiet bubble appears in the corner. Two buttons: keep telling me, or never mention this app again. Ignore it and it decides for you — in favour of telling you.
Zoom every morning is not news. Quiet it once and it stays quiet — for the camera and the mic both, still on the dashboard, still in the log, just never interrupting you again.
Why Blindfold?
Windows doesn't hand your camera to Chrome. It hands it to a system service, and that service hands the frames on. So every tool that goes looking for who holds the camera finds the same anonymous system process — which is true, and completely useless.
Blindfold asks Media Foundation instead, the same source behind the privacy dot, and the audio session APIs behind the volume mixer for the microphone. Both come back with the real client process: a name, a path, a PID, a device and a clock. Something you can act on.
Identification
Anything can call itself chrome.exe. So Blindfold doesn't stop at the name: it checks the program's signature against the certificates your PC already trusts, and tells you who actually signed it.
It knows what a few hundred ordinary programs are, and who they are normally signed by — so an app wearing a name that doesn't match its publisher gets said out loud, on the row, before you click anything. An unsigned chrome.exe is not Chrome.
Everything it says is an observation — "no digital signature" — never a verdict about somebody else's software. Blindfold tells you what it saw and lets you decide.
History
Every session goes on a timeline: which app, which sense, when it started, when it stopped, and how long it had. Days add themselves up, so "Tuesday" is one line before it's forty.
It reaches back further than the install, too. Windows quietly records the last time each app touched your camera or mic, and Blindfold can lift that into the log — so the first thing you see is not an empty page.
The log lives on your PC and keeps thirty days, then forgets by itself. Long enough to answer last week. Short enough that nothing here is sitting on a year of your habits — and Clear empties it for good, whenever you like.
Blindfold has nothing to say about what you do — only about what's looking at you while you do it.
Windows 10 & 11 · installs from the Microsoft Store
Straight answers
It doesn't watch the light. For the camera it listens to Media Foundation's sensor activity monitor — the same source Windows 11 uses to draw the privacy dot in your taskbar. The camera can't stream to an app without that signal firing, LED or no LED.
Same question, same kind of answer. Windows gives every program that opens a microphone an audio session — it's what the volume mixer lists — and that session names the process behind it. Blindfold counts only the ones actually capturing, so an app that used the mic earlier and never tidied up doesn't sit on your dashboard pretending to listen.
No. Blindfold never sees, stores or sends a frame of video or a moment of sound — it doesn't have your camera or your mic open, it only knows who else does. There's no account, no sync and nothing to opt out of. The one thing that ever leaves is the "What is this?" button, which opens a web search in your own browser, only when you press it.
It checks the program's Authenticode signature against the certificates your PC already trusts — offline, using nothing but permission to read the file. Where a program has no signature of its own, Windows' own catalogs are checked too, which is how half of Windows manages to be signed at all. If Blindfold can't read a file, it says not checked; it never reports that as unsigned.
Only once. Hit Quiet on the alert and that app never interrupts you again — camera or microphone, on this PC, across restarts, even if it comes back under a new process ID. It still appears on the dashboard and in the log, because you asked not to be interrupted, not to be lied to.
With History on, one entry per session: the app, the camera or mic, and the times. Thirty days, on this PC, and it forgets anything older by itself. Switch History off and nothing further is written; press Clear and what's there is gone — there's no copy anywhere to restore it from.
Some of it. Windows keeps its own note of the last time each app used your camera or microphone, and Blindfold can fold that into the History page. It's the last use of each app rather than every use — the page says so, so a short list is never mistaken for a quiet week.
None. It runs as an ordinary user and never shows a UAC prompt. That was a design constraint, not a shortcut: an app that needs admin can't ship through the Microsoft Store at all.
The camera side isn't polling anything — it sits idle until Windows says something changed. The microphone side counts active audio sessions once a second, which is a rounding error, and only speaks up when the answer is different. It runs all day in the tray without you noticing it's there.
You'll have its name, its executable path, its process ID, which camera or microphone it opened, who signed it and how long it's been there — which is everything you need to find it in Task Manager, uninstall it, or show somebody who can.
Windows 10 and Windows 11, 64-bit. It follows your Windows theme, light or dark, until you tell it otherwise. It's a Windows app — there's no Mac, phone or browser version.
Put it in your tray and forget it's there. It'll speak up when it matters.