WebEx is watching you, and won't stop

WebEx on the MacBook turns on the camera for no good reason, and doesn't let you turn it off.

I had a conference call yesterday, and as usual with these corporate time-wasters, there was a powerpoint deck intended to distract the audience from the carbon-14 decaying in their bones. I fired it up on the MacBook which I use for WebEx, because it doesn't work on Ubuntu and I've already wasted more than enough time trying to fix it. So it was going on (and on) repeating previous presentations, and I proceeded to try to get other work done.

When I proceeded to fire up Photo Booth to take a picture of an error I was getting on my iPhone I was told "The camera is already in use." That's weird, I thought. Sure enough, the little green light was on next to the camera. So I proceeded to close down apps. Finally nothing was left but WebEx, and when I shut that down the light turned off. Hmmm. So I started WebEx back up and started searching for the option to turn off the camera. And I kept searching. I couldn't find it, and that made me feel kind of dumb, so I sent in a support request to WebEx. Their response:

Hello Chuck,

Thank you for choosing WebEx.

Since you are using a built in camera, it starts automatically in the meeting. WebEx does not have any control over this and there is no option in the Meeting Manager to disable this feature.

However, if you are the host, you can uncheck the "Video" option while scheduling the session. You can uncheck this option even in the middle of the meeting.

To disable the webcam, please contact Mac Support or check in Mac Forums. For your convenience, I have provided a link which discuss about turning off webcam.

Disclaimer: The URL below will take you to a non-WebEx Web Site. WebEx does not control or is responsible for the information given outside of WebEx Web Sites.

http://osxdaily.com/2007/03/26/how-to-disable-the-built-in-isight-camera/

Please let me know if there is anything I can do to further assist you.

Regards
WebEx Technical Support.

Waitasecond. "WebEx does not have any control over this"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Do they not have the flipping source code? WTFH? And then they recommend that I go into a console and hobble my operating system's camera support? Are they high?

Of course, that's just bullshit. They allow the host of the meeting to control the cameras of the attendees, but they don't allow you to control the camera on your own flipping machine. This is a backassward privacy policy. I have no idea or control over where my video is going – it could be recorded, it could be broadcast: millions could be watching me absently pick my nose.

There is now a piece of tape covering the webcam on my MacBook. When I first used the iPhone I thought that the camera warnings when using an app that touches the camera were silly, but now I greatly appreciate them.

Bad WebEx. I'm still waiting for you to go out of business, you silly $3.2B behemoth.

Sayōnarā, WebEx

I have cursed WebEx for years:

• every time I waited ten minutes for the crappy ActiveX control or equally crappy Java applet to (fail to) load


• every time desktop sharing loaded but showed nothing


• every time I struggled to export a powerpoint document into its proprietary Universal (?!?) Communications Format with its Powerpoint plugin that never worked

why all that frustration? Just to control what page people look at during a powerpoint presentation, for the most part. Sometimes, rarely, for showing them an actual live application.

As with anything that truly pisses me off, I was once a fan. For one incandescent second in 1999 Webex was cool. But they never improved a damned thing. And fickle me, I've found a new shiny thing: Google Docs Presentations. For creating presentations it isn't much – you'd better not want more than bullet points – but for showing slides to others? Oh, bliss... just fire up the presentation and send the link to the attendees. So create your presentation in KeyNote, PowerPoint, or OpenOffice Presentation, save it in PowerPoint format, then upload it to Google Docs, and you're set. It is a beautiful thing. Bye-bye, WebEx, it was fun for a while.