I always use the mute switch on my microphone and not the mute switch in software.
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
#92I like the feature of my video conferencing software that popups up a helpful overlay when I start speaking while on mute. It lets me know I'm muted in case I don't intend to be and reminds me I can press and hold space to temporarily unmute.
Obviously it's listening white muted to do this, but it seems legit.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not long ago I dialed into a 100+ person, 3+ hour long quarterly planning type call. It was a video call, but I had to be in the car for part of the time so I dialed in. After sitting through over an hour, including the part I thought was essential to my team, I jumped off the call and proceeded to explain the shit show to my fellow passengers for 15m or so. When I got to my destination and pulled out my phone I disc…
Yes, be careful. You were lucky. Also, bloated apps lie to you and UIs are buggy, what you see in the UI may not be the case. I now disabled screensharing in MacOS privacy settings for all apps unless I am explicitly sharing.
But then when you need to use it you have to restart the app, right?
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
If your VC software decides to perform signal processing on the microphone input while it is running but you are muted then yes, it can determine things about your behavior. But that's true for literally all applications running on your computer. Evil software running on your machine can do all sorts of bad things.
You can tell that an application accesses the microphone these days.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
On Linux at least, Teams continue to grab the microphone even after the meeting has ended. You can see this by looking at apps registered for "recording". I'm not sure how that can be justified. Besides privacy, the issue is that this prevents the sound card from going to sleep, which may be an issue on laptops. But I guess this is insignificant compared to the rest of Teams' power consumption.
Teams is a real clustefuck, I do not believe it is a design decision but rather just poorly written code.
From the outside perspective, this must be true. Recently I have noticed, that Teams, unlike any other app I tried, is unable to properly distinguish between stereo and mic, when that arrives both at the headset jack (made for both, stereo and mic) of my laptop. When I switch in Teams to use that as mic, it means, that others hear themselves and do not hear me. I tried everything, but Teams is simply unable to take the proper mic input from the headset jack, while an app like audacity has no issue at all. Teams is utter garbage. Found topics on MS websites, where people are describing similar problems. The answers usually are: "Well, it is MS, what do you expect?" and no solution in sight. In the year. 2000 and 22. And this is what I am forced to deal with. So I had to go back to only have the output on headset jack and use the laptop internal mic, which very likely has much worse quality than my external on the desk standing microphone, which I am effectively unable to use, because I have to use Teams...
This stuff can drive you crazy. Each month there is some new annoyance or broken part, that I discover.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#96Quit hoping that software providers change in this regard and demand hardware with physical microphone kill switches.
The Framework laptop provides an example of a high quality, repairable laptop with physical kill switches for the mic and camera.
I love the UX of "Oops, it looks like you are talking but you are muted" and I also value privacy. The physical kill switch provides a true "mute button" when it's needed.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#97As a Deaf person, the notification annoyed the heck out of me and there are not even an option to disable the notification. I muted my mic because I am Deaf and I don't use my voice to communicate with my fellow Deaf friends over Zoom/Teams.
And there is no option to disable Zoom joining-room audio (the one that when you join the room, Zoom present the option to ask which microphone you want to enable). Why would I need to enable the microphone if I am signing to my Deaf boss? Deaf communities have major grief with those notifications.
At least, I can disable the microphone access in my macOS and Zoom won't complain. However disabling mic permission in iPadOS will make Zoom to whine about it. Every time I join a meeting, it will let me know that the microphone access is disabled and "kindly" asked me to enable it. In Windows, I can deny the microphone access to Zoom in the Windows setting, however for some reason that made Zoom to crash.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#98I 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…
Okay, given that they are not listening for any insidious purpose, they should all just add a legally binding, unrevokable clause to their all of their terms of service indicating that they will never sell any audio data or data derived from the audio data while the microphone is muted. Absent that, it is entirely legal for them to do so at any time for any reason with no consequences, so I see no reason why we should take the word of a amoral entity that pinky swears they will not do so when a legally binding statement is so much cleaner and more straightforward.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I hate the latter, because I use a keyboard shortcut to mute/unmute the microphone on the OS-level. This works fine with Google Meet, but in Microsoft Teams I have to use the button in its UI because that pop-up gets in the way (also: Teams not working at all in Firefox, what's up with that?).
Firefox is an unsupported browser - Teams works fine on Edge.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#100I 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…
got a modmic - popular mic - has a button on it to mute the mic- light turns red - pushed the button and went for a pee - came back to the meeting - left again to get a drink - came back - was asked to mute my mic - light was red - clicked hardware button - red light turned off - clicked again - right light turned on - mic was still active - no longer trust hardware buttons
Not all mics are like this. I have a Corsair gaming headset which has a hardware mute button. I frequently set it on mute when I'm munching on something, forget to unmute, and despite videoconferencing software and the OS thinking the Mic is unmuted, no signal is detected.