PSA: Chromium will soon disable camera capture after screen lock.

[Dale Curtis]

For privacy reasons, we've decided to disable camera capture 15s after a screen lock occurs.

The majority of developers and users should see no changes at all from this policy. Chromium already keeps the screen awake when capturing is active and screen lock during capture is very rare. However, some systems may be configured to prevent screen wake locks at the OS level.

Before making this change we collected data on how often users encounter screen lock in an active getUserMedia() session. Only ~0.7% of sessions ever encounter screen lock and of those, a 15s timeout avoids disrupting > ~70% of them.

We will provide a command line flag to disable this behavior for folks who have niche use cases:

--disable-features=StopVideoCaptureOnScreenLock.

I'll leave a few days for commentary on this thread and then submit https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/2971349 as part of the Chromium 93 release if there are no major surprises. 

Thanks in advance for any discussion!

- dale

[Philipp Hancke]

This will fire the ended event on the track so should be detectable, right?

In general that seems like a very good privacy enhancement!

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[Dale Curtis]

The 'muted' and 'unmuted' events will fire when the camera is suspended and resumed respectively. It'll be automatically resumed upon screen unlock.

- dale

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