Privacy Indicator Plugin

A privacy indicator widget that monitors and displays when microphone, camera, or screen sharing is active on your system.

Features

• Microphone Monitoring: Detects active microphone usage via Pipewire
• Camera Monitoring: Detects active camera usage by checking /dev/video* devices
• Screen Sharing Detection: Monitors screen sharing sessions via Pipewire
• Visual Indicators: Shows icons that change color based on active state
  • Active: Primary color
  • Inactive: Semi-transparent variant color
• App Information: Tooltip displays which applications are using each resource
• Adaptive Layout: Automatically adjusts layout for horizontal or vertical bar positions

Configuration

Access the plugin settings in Noctalia to configure the following options:

• Hide Inactive States: If enabled, microphone, camera, and screen icons are hidden whenever they are inactive. Only active states are shown.
• Remove Margins: If enabled, removes all outer margins of the widget.
• Icon Spacing: Controls the horizontal/vertical spacing between the icons.
• Active/Inactive Icon Color: Customize the colors for active and inactive states.
• Microphone Filter Regex: Regex pattern to filter out specific microphone applications. Matching apps are completely excluded from detection (they won't trigger the indicator or appear in tooltips). Use | to specify multiple patterns, e.g., effect_input.rnnoise|easyeffects.

Usage

The widget displays three icons in the bar:

• Microphone: Shows when any app is using the microphone
• Camera: Shows when any app is accessing the camera
• Screen Share: Shows when screen sharing is active

Hover over the widget to see a tooltip listing which applications are using each resource.

Requirements

• Noctalia Shell 3.6.0 or higher
• Pipewire (for microphone and screen sharing detection)
• Access to /dev/video* devices (for camera detection)

Technical Details

• Updates privacy state every second
• Uses Pipewire API to monitor audio/video streams
• Checks /proc/[0-9]*/fd/ for camera device access
• Detects screen sharing by analyzing Pipewire node properties and media class