Set the Privacy Indicators toggle to off to hide the orange / green dot on external displays.

Good news everyone!

As almost every visual artist on using macOS knows, in recent years Apple has added an orange / green dot that appears in the menubar whenever an application is using the microphone and / or camera for capture. While this privacy feature is generally a fantastically useful tool for people to track which apps may be recording sound and video, it was extremely annoying for anyone trying to perform live visuals. Although there have been several workaround published since then, none of them have been officially from Apple and always came with some additional security risks that were not worth the trouble.

Fortunately as of macOS 14.4 there is now a method provided by Apple for hiding the privacy dot on external displays! The instructions are fairly straightforward and can be found in this Apple support note: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/118449

After you’ve rebooted in Recovery Mode and entered the ‘system-override suppress-sw-camera-indication-on-external-displays=on’ command in the Terminal, the new option available in System Settings under Privacy & Security for the microphone / camera will allow you to turn the privacy dot on and off for external displays on demand. This makes it possible to quickly re-enable or disable the privacy feature temporarily as needed.

Note that this will only remove the privacy dot on external displays - this technique will not work on your main monitor.