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

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

#61

Post by EGreg »

sizzle wrote: post #38
EGreg wrote: post #17

My team and I built some of the world's most decentralized videoconferencing software, using WebRTC. You can try it on https://yang2020.app/meeting for example ... but it's available in all of our apps, including for teachers, etc. 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. Imagi…

Might want to hire some marketing and product branding agency folks to make sure you are branding this in a way that seems safe and trustworthy, so people will try it out and you can increase engagement and adoption.

That sounds like a great idea, but how much would it cost? We are kind of strapped for cash.

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

Godel_unicode wrote: post #18
SkyPuncher wrote: post #10

I feel like they're trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there's likely a good reason - user experience. At a hardware level, grabbing the microphone can take time. Even worse that timing is inconsistent across devices, workloads, etc. That leads to a bad experience when unmuting and needing to delay your commentary. The solution to this is to keep the microphone on, but mute at a sof…

Teams has a notice that it pops up if you're talking and on mute, and there's another for if you're not on mute but your mic is producing no signal (mic has it's own mute). I find those super helpful, personally.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by SllX »

lxgr wrote: post #44
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #11

> “With a camera, you can turn it off or even put your hand over it, and no matter what you do, no one can see you,” says Fawaz. “I don’t think that exists for microphones.” 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 c…

On my Thinkpad, this was still just interpreted as an OS-level keyboard shortcut, as far as I remember. A solution that actually (logically if not physically) deactivates any built-in microphone would arguably be at least as important as a "webcam shield". Apple does this for the built-in microphone for their newer laptops, but that benefit is immediately negated when e.g. connecting a USB webcam that also contains a…

Check out if you can disable the mic in Audio MIDI Setup on Mac OS X. I tend to use the built in webcam so I’ve never looked on an external one, but in theory you should be able to selectively disable the input/output of any device via its interface. I do this to disable the mic on Work equipment and use my own AirPods as the mic input.

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

#65

Post by remram »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #45
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #11

> “With a camera, you can turn it off or even put your hand over it, and no matter what you do, no one can see you,” says Fawaz. “I don’t think that exists for microphones.” 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 c…

Do these mute buttons actually hardware-mute the mic or do they send a keycode to the OS?

Usually the second. If you have multiple buttons to do it (for example dedicated button + Fn+F4 combination) then it's almost certainly software.

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

#66

Post by kyleplum »

rzzzt wrote: post #40
brimble wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is obvious: have the camera watch you even when it's "off". :-)

That is for the "You are talking, but others can't see your face" notification.

"We can see that you are talking. Would you like others in the meeting to see you as well?"

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

#67

Post by wolverine876 »

qiskit wrote: post #13

Isn't it common knowledge by now that cameras and microphones are still "on" even if you disable it at the software level? 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...

> being the CEO of a major corporation requires you take privacy more seriously

My privacy is as valuable to me.

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

#68

Post by Sakos »

SkyPuncher wrote: post #10

I feel like they're trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there's likely a good reason - user experience. At a hardware level, grabbing the microphone can take time. Even worse that timing is inconsistent across devices, workloads, etc. That leads to a bad experience when unmuting and needing to delay your commentary. The solution to this is to keep the microphone on, but mute at a sof…

Honestly, it feels like most people here aren't reading the article.

> The researchers then decided to see if they could use data collected on mute from that app to infer the types of activities taking place in the background. Using machine learning algorithms, they trained an activity classifier using audio from YouTube videos representing six common background activities, including cooking and eating, playing music, typing and cleaning. Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending, the team could identify the background activity with an average of 82% accuracy.

How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy?

How about we not make the default that companies can do whatever they want and users have to take steps like a hardware-muted mic (which isn't always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy?

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