Strange Google Hangout Phenomenon

This confirms the good sense of covering the camera lens when not in use. For example, I've long stuck a narrow strip of paper, torn from the adhesive part of a Post-It note, to my MBA's camera lens, removing it when making a video call.

takes a picture of you to store along with the metadata it sends to the NSA?

Can't replicate calling from either the Chrome extension or from within gmail.

My guess is that when the plugin initializes, it connects to the camera to confirm that the previous settings are still valid and then disconnects once it sees that video isn't needed.

This is your camera lighting up when it polls for its resolution, many cameras lie about their resolution so the most reliable way to know is to grab one frame. Mine does the same with that and other software.

> Why does my laptop's camera light briefly turn on after making a phone call using Google voice?

It turns out that the current Hangouts defaults to the video call mode, even if the user intends to use voice only. So the camera gets activated even though it's not going to be used.

One workaround is to disable Hangouts and revert to the old setup, the one where you placed voice-only calls from within Google Mail. I do it this way simply because I don't have any contacts who do video calling.