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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

#291

Post by Swannie »

ghostpepper wrote: post #172
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…

"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…

> The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted

You're reading it incorrectly.

The paper outlines that as far as they can tell Webex is not sending audio when the mute button is pressed, but is gain and other parameters, based on this audio. And this has been reported to Webex, and they are investigating.

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

#292

Post by Swannie »

viknod wrote: post #289
mortehu wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webex will by default listen for ultrasound emitted by some video conferencing devices for easy stop. If you disable this, does that change the results?

I was suspecting this was webex, I use an external audio device (plantronics/polycom Calisto 7200) that has an indicator when the microphone is active. It's only anecdotal, but for me when the webex ultrasound features is activated, the microphone is constantly active as long as webex chat is running. When the ultrasound detection is disabled, the microphone is disabled when not in a meeting. As an aside, this settin…

My understanding is that it activates when you make the Webex Teams/Meeting the application with focus, and should turn off some time after it is no longer the active application, I think ~60 seconds.

It is doing this for the ultrasonic room detection feature, which can be turned off.

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

#293

Post by SkyPuncher »

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…

> Is Zoom audited?

Yes. https://explore.zoom.us/en/trust/legal-compliance/

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

#294

Post by anticensor »

ls15 wrote: post #112
GraphenePants wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Firefox is an unsupported browser - Teams works fine on Edge.

> Teams works fine for me on Edge. "If you don't want to install our app, you can just install our browser."

Except it works when you supply the Edge user agent on Firefox, unlike Google services which are much harder to work around.

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

#295

Post by blindseer »

10u152 wrote: post #234
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I think you may not appreciate how intertwined your verbal cognitive skills are with your ability to think / type / communicate.

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

#296

Post by xiwenc »

What bothers me a lot sometimes is that i fear there is a bug in the software mute. Specially when this is implemented separately by each VC software. The bug that even if you think you are muted, the software still fed the audio to the audience.

The reason i’m raising this is knowing software is very complicated nowadays and are more susceptible for bugs. The other day my MS teams froze. I closed the app and tried to open it again. That didn’t work. It felt like i merrily closed the frontend while the backend was stuck. I remember the days a window was a task, closing that window terminates the task. These days are over. Somehow these softwares are made so complicated, not sure for what reason, that the likelihood of introducing bugs is increased.

So taking this frontend-backend example. Imagine the mute button just sends the command to backend for mute but the backend failed to do so. And the frontend assumed all was fine. The user would have been misinformed.

I would use the (hardware) button that stops the audio at the microphone level all the time.

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

#297

Post by johnwalkr »

Gigachad wrote: post #236
Edd314159 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s nice in theory for so many things (my favorite is choosing characters when typing in Japanese) but almost never overcomes the friction of using a third input device. I was somewhat of a proponent of it until I got a desktop, then I was happy to ditch it and have a consistent keyboard for desktop and laptop.

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

#298

Post by chaxor »

pmoriarty wrote: post #165
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…

Unfortunately, even if a company offered this, in today's world the product would likely have a hidden microphone that isn't listed on the featured hardware.

Much like the old physical typewriters had spyware hidden on them without the users knowledge. I would be willing to bet that every keyboard has something similar today.

It's also striking to see how many people believe that they can trust the 'little indicator lights' on their microphone and cameras to actually indicate that their physically cut off from power. Very, very few devices are made in a way that this is true, and I would be hard pressed to believe it even if it was started in a manual unless I physically checked the equipment.

Ultimately, just assume that the entire world can scrutinize everything that happens on or around any electronic device... so everything, all the time.

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

#299

Post by boomlinde »

nemothekid wrote: post #85
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…

Because a video conferencing app with a bad UX is going to be quickly supplanted with one with a better UX; the privacy concerns of being spied on by a video conferencing app while you are muted is very minute for most people. There should be a line between "companies doing whatever they want" because of some implied "nefarious" reasons, and "companies doing whatever they want" because their customers want a better e…

I have been using Microsoft Teams and its hard to imagine anyone buying it for the user experience, yet it's not an unpopular choice. It seems more likely to me that the fact that the organization already had a bunch of managed Microsoft software was the most important selling point, and that this is a common situation. "Admin experience" if you will.

So sure, Teams gets some things right, UX-wise, but for every "notify the user if they're speaking while they are muted" there's a "randomly scroll the chat back down while you're looking through history", a "randomly make it impossible to erase a link with backspace in the chat box" or a "don't let people see who is participating in the conference", and there's little incentive for them to avoid crap like it and avoiding whole categories of bugs because people are buying it for other reasons.

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

#300

Post by habosa »

If you're on a Mac, use Shush [0] to give yourself global mute control with a single keypress. You can set it on push-to-talk mode or push-to-silence mode, both are extremely useful. I have mine set to the Fn key and leave in PTT mode most of the time.

0: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/shush-microphone-manager/id496...

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