Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.wisc.edu

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 353 posts

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

#101

Post by sillysaurusx »

David wrote: post #34
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…

Very much this, it takes time to recapture the microphone and it's really annoying to lose the first part of what you say every time you unmute. I lead the video team at a videoconferencing app (gather.town) and we keep the microphone active when you mute for this reason. As seems to be pretty common, for the sake of privacy we do stop sending audio to the media server. That's a tradeoff, since we're still susceptibl…

Shoutout to gathertown. Love what you’re doing.

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

#102

Post by markstos »

georgyo wrote: post #81
Sakos wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

I think there are two different problem here. 1. When the mic is soft muted, information is getting sent to the conference provider which could leak information about private matters. 2. When the mic is not muted all information is definitely going to the conference provider in a way they can decrypt so they can mix it. That is to say that when using most conference software, you have already granted then access to c…

End-to-End encryption for group video and audio is now supported. I'm not sure it works or who is supporting besides Signal, but it is apparently not not required that the conference provider decrypt the streams to mix them.

https://mashable.com/article/signal-end-to-end-encrypted-gro...

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

#104

Post by zaphod12 »

Google Meet certainly stays on, but does not try to pretend it doesn't. Feature, not a bug. And this is google, who you know has no compunctions about data collection. The microphone volume icon continues to show movement based on noise from your microphone and it will even prompt you if it thinks you're speaking to unmute yourself.

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

#105

Post by admax88qqq »

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…

Not to mention the feature of notifying a user they are muted if it sounds like they're trying to talk.

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

#106

Post by gwbas1c »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #97

As 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 n…

Then why mute yourself?

Even more interesting: Why do you prefer to sign over video instead of typing? Are there forms of expression that are more natural that way?

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

#108

Post by vladvasiliu »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #95
_notathrowaway wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I've never had your particular issue, but my favorite has got to be that it somehow "loses" the mic between conferences, although the sound server shows it as still recording...

I can understand not detecting something, or badly, but if it works now, and then on the next conference it figures "nah, there's no mic", I just can't understand what it does.

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

#109

Post by KennyBlanken »

markstos wrote: post #102
georgyo wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two different problem here. 1. When the mic is soft muted, information is getting sent to the conference provider which could leak information about private matters. 2. When the mic is not muted all information is definitely going to the conference provider in a way they can decrypt so they can mix it. That is to say that when using most conference software, you have already granted then access to c…

End-to-End encryption for group video and audio is now supported. I'm not sure it works or who is supporting besides Signal, but it is apparently not not required that the conference provider decrypt the streams to mix them. https://mashable.com/article/signal-end-to-end-encrypted-gro...

Element/Matrix also support e2ee.

Jitsi has supposed e2ee videoconferencing (on Chrome - they used some chrome-specific API for processing) for (I believe) at least a year or two.

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

#110

Post by gwbas1c »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #2

Google Meet at least it's very obvious to tell they do this because if you talk while muted, they will show a pop-up saying that you're talking but you're muted. Whether this functionality is justification for more nefarious data usage remains to be seen.

Zoom also has a similar popup. It's quite useful, too.

> “It turns out, in the vast majority of cases, when you mute yourself, these apps do not give up access to the microphone,” says Fawaz. “And that’s a problem. When you’re muted, people don’t expect these apps to collect data.”

I wouldn't assume that's nefarious

Post reply on HN