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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

#161

Post by oauea »

soheil wrote: post #149
paxys wrote: post #147

They are confusing the concepts of an app level vs OS level mute. If the app itself paints a mute button, of course there's no guarantee that it will do what it says. You have to trust the developers at their word, that they are actually ditching the audio feed coming into their application. Some apps even use the audio to provide useful functionality (like a "you are speaking while muted" notification). If you are r…

Why wouldn’t said app also be able to programmatically unmute at the os-level?

It could, but you'll notice and then uninstall that app.

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

#162

Post by fsflover »

winternett wrote: post #159

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.

For microphones it may not work well. I prefer hardware kill switches on my Librem 15.

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

#163

Post by brodock »

joshuaissac wrote: post #154
julienb_sea wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

They also kept microfone on after closing calls, and reverted after getting caught https://thinksproutinfotech.com/news/zoom-update-fixes-macos...

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

#164

Post by Dig1t »

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…

You are right that the problems you listed are easily solved by keeping the mic open/streaming.

If you actually value privacy as a company though, these are all very solvable problems.

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

#165

Post by pmoriarty »

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…

"if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone"

Even if you get an external microphone which can be muted, if you're on a laptop you'll still have an internal microphone which can't be muted except through software.

What we really need are laptops sold without microphones and cameras. Then you can just use external ones only, and be sure that no one's listening/looking when you unplug them.

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

#166

Post by vladvasiliu »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #151
vladvasiliu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ...

I find that usually (but not always...) restarting Teams works. I chalk it up to "made by Microsoft". People make fun of me at work when I ask them if they tried rebooting it whenever they have a problem (the company I work for runs Windows on the desktop, I'm the odd one out running Linux).

I used to think that this was an issue with me running Linux, and an "unsupported" distro at that (Arch). But I'm always reassured (in a way) when I see people having the exact same issues I do on Windows, with basic, run-of-the-mill configs (I have multiple sound cards, some of which come and go).

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

#167

Post by neura »

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…

It's simple. Most video conferencing apps that I've used will let you know that your mic is muted when you try to speak and your mic is muted.

If you think they're doing something else, then don't use it. If you think you don't have a choice because your employer requires you to use it, your choice is not in whether or not to use the software. If it's something you care about, there's always a choice.

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

#168

Post by asxd »

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…

I don't think an application has to actually do anything with the audio data in order to retain its access to the microphone. I'm not an expert here, but I'd imagine it's something like this:

    mic = grab_access_to_mic()
    while app_is_running:
        if (is_muted):
            pass
        else:
            send_that_audio(mic)
It also mentions some of the apps sending the muted audio "to the cloud", which seems completely unrelated to retaining access to the mic.

Also, seems like an honest mistake, but I think they got this backwards, right?

> They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular videoconferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted.

Wouldn't it be driver -> app -> cloud? I think I'm splitting hairs at this point though.

Lastly, it would be nice if this article at least listed the apps that were investigated.

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

#169

Post by nyuszika7h »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #86
prettyStandard wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's BS. I changed my user agent to Chrome and it worked just fine.

It is BS, but when I tried that, I had other things not working, like sharing my screen. So it is BS, but not merely for looking at the user agent of the browser, but for the software development incapability or unwillingness on the side of MS. (Edit: While basically every other voice chat / video chat web app works fine on FF, so basically everyone but MS and Slack has solved this problem years ago. Go figure.)

GoToMeeting also refuses to work in Firefox.

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

#170

Post by trelane »

UncleMeat wrote: post #88
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…

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.

> 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.

This is why I personally insist on using the web version of streaming software over an installed binary.

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