You have a monkey tail cactus. For awhile they grow vertical and then once they reach a certain stage they droop down and grow downward. If you Google monkey tail cactus you can see a bunch of photos. They look very lovely in a hanging basket.

My pixel has a setting that displays a green dot in the notification/status bar whenever an app is utilizing my camera/microphone. And I can disable that for each app that I don't want to access my camera.