Security issue related to webcam access?

kjohnsosmumn
Hello, I am a college instructional librarian who uses Zotero as a teaching tool. I had a student yesterday report to me that she no longer uses Zotero because when she had it installed in the past (2019), she found that her laptop was experiencing security issues, including unprompted webcam recording. She took her laptop to our university's IT department, and they told her Zotero was causing the issues and uninstalled it. I've never heard of a situation like this happening before, but I was wondering if anyone else had? I don't want to recommend that students install Zotero if it could be causing problems like this!
  • adamsmith
    Zotero (whose source code is public) includes no code to access the webcam, let alone record with it.
    Assuming the student correctly reported the conversation with IT, whoever helped her was both incompetent and irresponsible.

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