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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

#231

Post by rob_c »

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…

have to agree, it's not well explained, but hardly seems like a smoking gun that google/zoom/skype are listening out for anti-government hysteria...

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

#232

Post by rob_c »

Sakos wrote: post #68
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…

please go away and read about the architectural permissions for things like this, performance, latency and re-read this... if it bugs you throw away your smartphone or custom-compile lineageOS

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

#233

Post by hu3 »

subpixel wrote: post #76
systemvoltage wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once I was on Teams meeting and someone exclaimed “We can see your screen, systemvoltage!”. Sure as hell, I wasn’t sharing anything. Thankfully I wasn’t browsing HN, but writing code. These things implemented somewhere in the middle of the stack seems dangerous. I much more prefer a slider switch. Preferably made from real atoms and molecules.

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…

I love Discord for some usecases but a while ago I pressed the mute button to talk to my brother sitting next to me and my discord friend made a joke about what I said while muted.

I double-checked Discord and the mic icon was displaying as muted but I could still talk to my friend regardless.

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

#234

Post by 10u152 »

Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #125
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?

> Then why mute yourself? Why not? The only sound they will find is my dogs barking, doors slamming (I lives in apartment), my partner talking in his phone, all of that background noise. Why participants should be subjected to those noise and why Zoom need to know the noises? > Why do you prefer to sign over video instead of typing? Are there forms of expression that are more natural that way? We signs because Signed…

I'm fascinated by your last point. Are you saying that being deaf impedes your written communication ? As a layman I would have thought that written communication would be a godsend.

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

#236

Post by Gigachad »

Edd314159 wrote: post #219
andrei_says_ wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MacBook pros already have a mute-speaker button. It would be so nice to have a mute-mic button which lights up when muted.

Ironically this is a good use case for a Touch Bar: a button on your keyboard that is only there _sometimes_ because it’s only needed in certain contexts (when you’re on a call)

The touch bar is like an idea that works really well in your head. It has so many theoretical cool uses. But in reality I end up never using it for anything.. I would have been happy if the new one had the touch bar and the function keys, but that would have been extra cost for a feature people just aren't using.

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

#237

Post by gruturo »

kazinator wrote: post #141

Use a headset with a hardware mute button.

I've been trying to buy one (bluetooth). I'm on headset #3, advertised as having a mute button, like the previous 2, which does absolutely nothing, like the previous 2.

I'd gladly shell out 100 bucks for a bluetooth headset with a real mute button, which just cuts off the mic, instead of telling the PC to do something (which the PC apparently won't do without custom drivers, which I can't install on my company-issued laptop, and which I wouldn't trust either).

Bonus if it's 1 ear only, I find those (esp. the ones with the arc overhead) more comfortable in long sessions, and my job has a lot of those.

Can anyone point me at one known to actually work? Thanks!

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

#238

Post by Gigachad »

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.

On Macos, there is an indicator dot in the status bar, on all chat apps, the mic dot is always active while the camera dot does turn off when the camera is disabled. The most likely situation is that turning the mic and camera on at the OS level has delay which is acceptable for turning on video but not for audio where you want to be able to respond to something quickly.

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

#239

Post by ivanhoe »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #193
notreallyserio wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a weird culture around reporting problems without reporting names. You see it a lot here on HN and occasionally in media. I'll never understand. Why bother talking about corporate misbehavior (or etc) and not back it up with the basic, minimal data you could provide?

Maybe their research is ongoing, maybe they are afraid of being sued, maybe they'd rather not harm a company so reputation without fully understanding why they do this

So why did they publish the text now then (other than obviously for self-promotion)?

Why not finishing their research first, discussing with lawyers how not get sued, and contacting the company about it so that they can fix it or comment on it, and only then publishing the proper, responsible research that is actually useful to someone?

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

#240

Post by saghm »

notreallyserio wrote: post #189
ghostpepper wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one popular app gathering information and delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not." The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted. I'm not sure why they don't say which one, and I'm not sur…

There's a weird culture around reporting problems without reporting names. You see it a lot here on HN and occasionally in media. I'll never understand. Why bother talking about corporate misbehavior (or etc) and not back it up with the basic, minimal data you could provide?

I imagine it's to avoid getting sued by the company behaving poorly. Companies bring lawsuits against good-faith security researchers all the time to try to silence them, so if you were a researcher, why would you expect the one company among the several you researched who's potentially misbehaving to not misbehave by trying to sue you into silence?
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