MicCameraGuard 🛡️

MicCameraGuard is a lightweight, native macOS menu bar application written purely in Swift. It lives entirely in your Mac's status bar (with no dock icon!) and watches your microphone and camera in real-time, alerting you the moment any app starts or stops accessing them.

Features

• Real-Time Microphone Detection — Detects which apps are actively using your microphone by inspecting coreaudiod via lsof.
• Real-Time Camera Detection — Detects camera activity by parsing recent cmio system log entries.
• Status Card — Colour-coded summary (green = all clear, orange = mic active, red = camera active) shown at the top of the panel.
• Active App List — Displays the name of every app currently accessing your camera or microphone.
• Access Event History — Scrollable log of the last 100 start/stop events with app name, device type, and relative timestamp (e.g. "3m ago").
• Direct Privacy Settings Link — One tap opens the relevant macOS System Settings pane (Microphone or Camera) without navigating menus.
• Configurable Poll Interval — Choose how often to check: 1s, 2s, 5s, or 10s.
• Notifications — Optional alerts when a new app begins accessing your hardware.
• Local-Only — All event history is stored locally in ~/Library/Application Support/MicCameraGuard/. Nothing is sent anywhere.
• Theme Support — System, Light, or Dark mode.
• No Xcode Required — Builds entirely from the terminal using a custom shell script.

Requirements

• macOS 13.0 (Ventura) or later
• Swift 5.7+ (included with Xcode Command Line Tools)

Preview

History view

Installation & Setup

You can build and run MicCameraGuard directly from your terminal without opening Xcode.

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/BogdanAlinTudorache/MicCameraGuard.git
   cd MicCameraGuard

2. Make the build script executable (first time only):

   chmod +x build.sh

3. Build the app:

   ./build.sh

4. Run it directly:

   open build/MicCameraGuard.app

5. (Optional) Install to your Applications folder:

   cp -r build/MicCameraGuard.app /Applications/

Customization

Click the shield icon in your menu bar to open the privacy panel. Tap the gear icon to open Settings.

• Show notifications — toggle access alerts on / off
• Poll interval — 1s / 2s / 5s / 10s (lower = faster detection, higher = less CPU)
• Theme — System / Light / Dark

Note: MicCameraGuard uses heuristic detection via lsof and system logs. It may not catch every access method on all macOS versions, but covers the most common cases. For camera access in particular, grant MicCameraGuard Full Disk Access in System Settings → Privacy & Security for the most accurate results.