Guard monitors your Mac's camera and freezes any process that tries to access it — until you explicitly approve. Open source. Fully local. No data leaves your machine.
"zoom.us" (PID: 4821) wants to use your camera.
The process is suspended until you decide.
Guard sits quietly in your menu bar until something tries to access your camera. Then it acts — instantly.
Processes are frozen with SIGSTOP the instant they touch the camera. Nothing gets through until you say so.
CoreMediaIO polling at 500ms intervals. Camera access is detected before the process can read a single frame.
Apps you don't trust get auto-blocked on every future attempt. No prompts, no interruptions — just silent protection.
Every camera access attempt is recorded — process name, PID, bundle ID, timestamp, and whether it was allowed or blocked.
No network calls, no telemetry, no accounts. Guard runs entirely on your Mac. Your data never leaves your machine.
Every line of code is auditable. No trust required — read it, build it, verify it yourself. MIT licensed.
Guard uses macOS CoreMediaIO APIs to detect camera hardware activation, then freezes the responsible process before it can read any frames.
Guard polls CoreMediaIO's kCMIODevicePropertyDeviceIsRunningSomewhere every 500ms. The moment any process activates the camera hardware, Guard knows.
The offending process is immediately sent SIGSTOP — a kernel-level signal that cannot be caught or ignored. The process is completely suspended. No frames are read.
A modal alert shows you exactly which process tried to access your camera. Choose Allow (SIGCONT resumes it), Block (SIGTERM kills it), or Always Block (adds to permanent list).
I always wondered which apps were secretly using my camera. Now I don't have to wonder — I just get asked. — The reason Guard exists
Download the pre-built app or build from source. No dependencies, no frameworks, no Xcode required.
git clone https://github.com/FaisalFehad/Guard.git
cd Guard
./build.sh
open build/Guard.app
swiftc (included with Xcode Command Line Tools).xcode-select --install if you don't have it.