What does the green or orange dot on the top of your phone mean?

You may have noticed every now and then that a little green or orange dot has appeared in the upper part of your smartphone’s screen. Like a ghost though it seems to come and vanish into thin air unexpectedly.

If one is of a paranoid nature, you may be thinking it’s your device or something else monitoring your activity. Not quite, it is there so to inform you what is happening with certain devices on your smartphone so that you can take any necessary steps to ensure your privacy.

What does the green or orange dot on the top of your phone mean?

Whether you are using iOS or Android will make a difference in which color light you see appear. The former uses both green and orange dots to let you know whether your camera or microphone is being accessed by an app.

The orange indicator turns on only when the microphone is being used by an app while the green indicator is for when the camera or both the camera and microphone are in use. In the case of Android a green dot is used for both.

It should come as no surprise that Apple was the first to implement this system on their iPhones positioning itself as the most privacy-sensitive big tech company since 2014. The green and orange dots first appeared in 2020 with iOS 14. Android was quick to follow starting with Android 12 that came out a year later.

Green and orange indicators help inform users to adjust privacy settings

We live in a world of apps today and there are over 2.87 million available to be downloaded on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store at last count according to Kurve, a mobile app marketing agency. The average user has between 60 and 90 apps installed on their smartphone.

We often want to get straight into using a new app so we may forgo setting all the privacy settings, saving the task for later. That could be an opportunity for when you may start to notice that those indicator lights are coming on when you clearly not using your camera or microphone.

However, some of those spiffy new apps we may not want accessing our camera or microphone whenever they want to. Or we may have rethought how much control over our privacy that we want. Either way, you can take control of the situation.

How to find what apps are accessing your smartphone camera and microphone

Android user need to go to ‘settings’ and find the ‘Security and privacy’ tab. Next click on the ‘Privacy’ tab. That will reveal you privacy dashboard where you will see how often your camera, microphone and location have been accessed by your apps. Go into ‘View all permissions’ and tap the ‘apps’ tab and you will get a list of apps as well as the time and which “permission” that they accessed.

iOS users can get an ‘App Privacy Report’ by first going to ‘Settings’ and tapping the ‘Privacy & Security’ tab. Scroll to and tap App Privacy Report and tap the toggle to turn it on.

You won’t get the full details right away as your iPhone will have to collect details on what your apps are up to while you are using your phone. The data collected is encrypted and stored on your device, so only you have access to it. You can erase the report by simply turning of the function.