Why webcam proctoring is off by default
AlgoArena can take periodic still images during an assessment, but only if the hiring company turns it on, and only after the candidate grants camera access. It ships off. Nothing about a candidate is ever inferred from their face.
Watching a face does not tell you who cheated
The industry treats the camera as the integrity story. We do not, for a practical reason before an ethical one: attention monitoring produces confident-looking output that does not survive contact with real candidates. It flags nervous people, people with unusual setups, people who look away to think. It misses prepared cheating entirely.
So a camera-derived flag lands in front of a hiring manager as a number they cannot check and cannot explain to the person they are about to reject. That is the single most common complaint candidates have about assessment platforms, and it is a product failure, not a policy one.
We would rather give you four signals that are boring, countable, and arguable than one signal that sounds authoritative and is not.
What AlgoArena never does
Not configurable, not on a roadmap, not available on request.
- Gaze or eye tracking
- Emotion or affect inference
- Lip reading
- Face geometry or faceprints
- Automated identity matching
- Continuous video recording
Where a company does enable snapshots, the images go to that company's reviewers and nowhere else. No model scores them, and they never move a candidate's result on their own.
What the integrity score is made of
Four signals, all captured in the browser, none of them biometric. The score is arithmetic, not a model judging a person, so the same session always produces the same number.
Paste events
How much arrived by paste rather than typing, and whether pasted code carries the shape of model output. Only counted where the question did not permit AI.
Tab switches
How often focus left the assessment, and whether it left in bursts. A burst reads differently from steady checking.
Focus loss
How often the window lost focus entirely. Weighted lightly, because people get interrupted.
Multiple monitors
Whether a second display was present during the session.
Every deduction comes with the reason that caused it, in plain language, on the report. A reviewer can see "14 tab switches (burst of 6)" rather than a bare score, open the replay at that moment, and decide for themselves. The score is advisory. It never rejects anyone.
On Agentic questions the score is not shown at all. Pasting model output is the point of that exercise, so measuring it as suspicion would be meaningless.
If a company does turn snapshots on
The candidate is told first
Before the timer starts, the candidate sees what will be recorded, in the same words on every assessment: periodic still images, not continuous video. The browser asks for camera permission separately.
A person looks, or nobody does
Snapshots are capped per session and are only ever viewed by the hiring company's own reviewers. There is no automated pass over them.
They are deleted on a schedule
An automated job destroys snapshots once a hiring decision has been recorded and the company's retention window has passed, and in any case within three years. Deletion runs whether or not anyone asks.
Images of a candidate are sensitive data under biometric-privacy laws in several places, including Illinois, whether or not anything is inferred from them. That is part of why the setting is off unless a company deliberately turns it on, and why we keep the retention window short. Companies operating where consent or disclosure is required are responsible for meeting those obligations for their own candidates.
See what a report actually says
Integrity context sits beside the work, never on top of it.