I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Most likely one of those sites is probing your webcam for what formats it supports as a way to fingerprint your device. It's technically a privacy issue (because it can often be used combined with other data to uniquely identify a particular device), but it isn't something that actually requires capturing any video or images, so many browsers don't actually prompt you about it (for example, Chrome does not prompt for this type of access even when you have it configured to ask you before letting sites use your camera).
I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Again, given that it's technically not actually using the camera by most definitions (it's like asking for a menu at a restaurant, you're not actually a patron of the restaurant until you order food, and you technically can walk out before even ordering anything after just looking at the menu), a lot of browsers just don't prompt about it, even if configured to ask before access.
A lot of security software though takes a very pessimistic view on hardware access though, and considers anything that access a piece of hardware at all (even if it's just to ID the hardware) to be 'using' that hardware.
Most likely one of those sites is probing your webcam for what formats it supports as a way to fingerprint your device. It's technically a privacy issue (because it can often be used combined with other data to uniquely identify a particular device), but it isn't something that actually requires capturing any video or images, so many browsers don't actually prompt you about it (for example, Chrome does not prompt for this type of access even when you have it configured to ask you before letting sites use your camera).
I'm not sure why it ain't asking me though it's set to "ask before access":
Again, given that it's technically not actually using the camera by most definitions (it's like asking for a menu at a restaurant, you're not actually a patron of the restaurant until you order food, and you technically can walk out before even ordering anything after just looking at the menu), a lot of browsers just don't prompt about it, even if configured to ask before access.
A lot of security software though takes a very pessimistic view on hardware access though, and considers anything that access a piece of hardware at all (even if it's just to ID the hardware) to be 'using' that hardware.
The restaurant analogy is neat 😁
Thanks for the clarification, Austin... very appreciated!