I was a little horrified to see the webcam light on illuminated as I opened my laptop this morning. Who was watching I wondered! Took me a while to figure out what was using the web cam, then I found a simple solution. The command lsof | grep video0 told me skype was the culprit. Restart skype, problem solved, web cam off. Happy morning.

On the way, I found this which suggested using modproble -r to disable the kernel module. I tried modprobe -r uvcvideo but I got “FATAL: Module uvcvideo is in use.” Then I figured out lsof would tell me what was going on.