More photos in the comments. Is it supposed to be connected to the motherboard? I found it in the case. It wasn’t connected. I think that the backside is some sort of thermal patch. I can tell that it’s not a camera but I’m very confused and the connection reminds me of more of a laptop or phone connection not something you would see in a PC. The data matrix contains the same text as the white sticker.
I’m going to buck the trend here and propose that this is probably a component off of a hard drive. It’s very common to find that type of flat film cable linking the driver board(s) to various components or the spindle motor on those, and since they have to fit within a defined footprint for a 3.5"/2.5" drive body they often use tiddly little laptop-eque ZIF connectors and so forth. The “thermal pad” on the back is most likely a piece of double sided adhesive foam tape that was mounting it to whatever it originally went with.
The dingus it terminates in definitely looks like it ought to be a mic or a piezo speaker. There’s obviously no call for a microphone on a hard drive, but having a little speaker on an industrial/enterprise drive or its controller board definitely makes sense, for the purposes of screaming at the operator if the drive is in an error state. It was probably unplugged by the previous owner to make it shut up, and it’s likely that the drive is no longer in that computer because the reason it was screaming at them was because it had failed.
My favorite theory so far, sounds very likely
I thought so too but I looked at about a dozen 3.5inch HDDs and they all use 3 or 4 wire ffcs with much thicker traces.
I’m sure 2.5 inch hdds can use thinner traces for their motors but I can’t see why they would need more than 4.