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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

#151

Post by zelphirkalt »

vladvasiliu wrote: post #108
zelphirkalt wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh losing the mic has happened to me mid-call many many times. Suddenly I would notice, that someone does not respond to anything I am saying, then check in Teams and, what do you know ... "Your microphone is not working.". I leave call, call again, without changing anything, mic works again ...

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

#152

Post by necovek »

Tepix wrote: post #94
UncleMeat wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that simple. An application could have access to the microphone, but an OS could be providing the mute functionality, thereby not passing any data to the app even if it keeps access to it (there are hardware/software issues with releasing and reaccessing it with extremely low latency like one expects of a mute/unmute button).

The problem, as reported in the article, is that apps are not making use of the OS mute, but are instead still reading from the microphone, and some are even passing the readout to their servers.

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

#153

Post by chefandy »

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #118
UncleMeat wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In like 25% of my meetings, somebody is accidentally muted while they are trying to speak. The popup speeds up the process of them unmuting.

I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever tur…

We all have our shortcomings.

Some people don’t intuitively track the state of the video conferencing microphone, especially if they have cognitively involved jobs or lots of distractions. Mine are 1) the inability to resist that little self esteem boost from disdainfully highlighting inanity of other people’s shortcomings, and 2) making snide comments.

They’re both super obnoxious but I’m working on them.

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

#154

Post by joshuaissac »

julienb_sea wrote: post #139
ortusdux wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because a video conferencing app with a bad UX is going to be quickly supplanted with one with a better UX For the vast majority of users, price beats UX. If a company can keep their app free by selling user data, they will out-compete paid alternatives, regardless of the UX.

This is not how enterprise software works. Audited data privacy is a core selling point of enterprise communication systems like Slack and Zoom, which are able to charge a lot of money for enterprise licenses and have very viable business models. You're right that this may not work in the consumer space, but that battle is already lost -- there are myriad free communication options available to consumers such as mess…

> Audited data privacy is a core selling point of enterprise communication systems like Slack and Zoom

Is Zoom audited? Zoom had been lying for about having end-to-end encryption, for example, until they were caught by the US Federal Trade Commission. Surely, something like that would have been discovered earlier in an audit, if they were audited and the audits were worth something.

They were also sending data to third parties like Facebook and Google through their SDKs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-use...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...

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

#155

Post by asojfdowgh »

marricks wrote: post #117
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy? Because they're not actually doing that? These researchers did everything they could think of to come up with the most concerning headline. I imagine someone, somewhere is going to make a video conferencing app that closes the audio interface every time you press mute. I also expect few people will use that option because it adds additional l…

> Because they're not actually doing that? >> Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending Are you sure they’re not? The used these algorithms on telemetry packets sent from browsers. I see no reason to give companies whose revenue is built on ads the benefit of the doubt here.

I don't think one should go to the level of making random bs claims about things, and then blaming the groups one is making the claims about.

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

#156

Post by necovek »

quantified wrote: post #113
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…

It is, just most people don’t care. And you can’t buy a little shutter for your laptop mic like you can for the camera.

You can control your microphone in your OS settings. While we are still on PulseAudio, check out pavucontrol for Linux systems. I am sure there are equivalent tools for Windows or MacOS.

There are also laptops with hardware microphone switches (eg. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ or https://frame.work/).

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

#157

Post by Aerroon »

svxml wrote: post #126
gwbas1c wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Is it a serious question? Why do you prefer to speak over video instead of typing?

I am curious about that too (although others have already answered). I prefer typing over speaking.

But I have realized that a lot of people I interact with find it more difficult to understand information in written form. Ie it's easier to teach someone with spoken language than over written text.

I dislike video calls.

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

#159

Post by winternett »

Nothing beats black electrical tape that you can easily put over microphones and cameras when you don't want them to be live... It's going to really be the easiest and most reliable way to ensure a decent level of privacy moving forward. I've been using it for ages now.
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