What VirtualCam will never do — and why we show a marker
Feature requests that would make the product 'better' and the world worse. The lines we've drawn in advance, so they hold under pressure.
Every product has a feature list. This post is the opposite: the list of things VirtualCam will not do, written down now — while it’s cheap to promise — so the promises hold later, when a growth chart argues otherwise.
Never: a stealth mode
The most common “feature request” we expect: make the on-page marker disappear, make the extension undetectable, make the virtual feed indistinguishable to the person on the other end.
No. A video call is a place where two humans agree on what’s real. A tool optimized to defeat that agreement is a deception tool. The marker stays visible while a feed is live, and the extension’s state is always observable — badge, popup, page. You always know your camera is on, because the honest use of this product starts with that.
Never: proctoring evasion
Exam-monitoring software has one job: confirm the person on camera is the person taking the test, live. VirtualCam will not add features whose purpose is beating it, and our guides will not cover how. This isn’t squeamishness about the technique — it’s that the victim of the trick is everyone whose credentials share a room with the person who cheated.
Never: sell, share, or “anonymously analyze” your video
The architecture makes this boring to promise: phone video goes directly between your devices, Blank Screen never leaves your machine, and the pairing service has no storage for media. There is no pile of faces to monetize, no data broker API in a future roadmap, no “de-identified training dataset”. Video never touches a server — that sentence is the whole policy, enforced by physics.
Never: an account requirement on the free core
No sign-up wall, no email-for-download, no “create an account to keep using the free tier”. The extension works the moment it’s installed; settings live on your device. If we ever can’t afford to run the pairing service without accounts, we’ll shrink features honestly rather than grow a user graph.
Never: a paid tier, or sneaky monetization
There is no paid tier and never will be one — no unlocks, no “Pro” retitle, no shrink-the-free-tier. The website carries ads, disclosed on the privacy policy; the extension itself will never contain ads, timers or watermarks. If we’re ever embarrassed to describe a monetization change on the changelog, that’s the signal the change is wrong.
Never: fake social proof
No stock-photo testimonials, no invented user counts, no “trusted by 10,000 teams”. When real users say real things, quotes will appear with names and context. Until then the honest platform status is the most social proof this site can offer.
Why publish the fences?
Because lines that only exist in the founders’ heads move under pressure, and lines in writing require a public retraction to move. Hold us to these. It’s the cheapest audit you’ll ever run.