You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off

Maybe it doesn't exist on whatever sleek glassy slabs they're working with, but the old Thinkpad, Elitebook, and Precision workstation laptops I have around me at the moment all have dedicated microphone mute buttons (the Precision has a Fn key combo, the others have physical buttons that do nothing but mute the microphone) that I reach for before trying to mouse over to a different mute button for a particular videoconferencing app.

Zuckerburg has been taping webcam/microphones/etc for a while now. Though being the CEO of a major corporation requires you take privacy more seriously.

https://www.macworld.com/article/228326/mic-drop-how-to-keep...

Many laptops (notably including MacBooks) can be damaged by even fairly thin camera covers. Which sucks, because they should very obviously be standard.

Since a major point of our platform (qbix.com/platform) is to avoid relying on external third parties, that meant we built a version of livestreaming that is completely peer-to-peer. Imagine a giant tree at whose root are the WebRTC participants "on stage", the ones getting their feed directly get the least lag, and then people just join different parts of the tree (and ask to rejoin if the parent node dropped out or is too slow).

Here is what we learned:

1. On some platforms, it's hard to turn off the audio listening, because you can't turn it back on later. So you have to just disconnect the audio stream going out, but it's still being captured.

2. When someone is "muted" in a chat, what this really means in P2P setups is that the peers have to "respect this setting" and simply ignore the audio/video stream that the one muted is sending.

3. Sometimes, it's very valuable from a business standpoint to grab the incoming video, and do eye recognition and face tracking (yes we support all that too, in our platform, it's available in Javascript). So a teacher can, for example, take attendance and know which students are no longer present or engaged, without actually seeing their feed. All of it is done on the client side of the student, and with their consent.

Each of 1, 2, 3 can lead to a determined "hacker" kid making it seem like they're listening when they're not, etc. But there are some cool tricks to make it really hard and expensive to pull off perfectly.

We use this, for example, to award credits to people for completing educational materials or listening to a show, as with https://ftl.fm

Some people complain, but I've had way too many people join and not realize their mic is live, so the meeting is interrupted by random dude shouting at his children to stop making noise, etc.

Or even better, when the meeting tool has a "Call me at this number" tool, but does not require validation before bridging the audio. So instead the CEO's All-Hands PowerPoint presentation is interrupted by that one guy who tried to have Zoom/WebEx/GoToMeeting call his cellphone, but the call goes to his voicemail instead and the voicemail audio plays over the (recorded) conference. Fun times. I've seen it happen multiple times.