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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

#321

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)

But then we're back at a software button, not an hw one.

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

#322

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 never enjoyed Lync/ Skype for business but one thing it did right was supporting mute on headsets in sync with the app.

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

#323
> “And that’s a problem. When you’re muted, people don’t expect these apps to collect data.”

The lesson here for the user:

Don't rely on the software. Mute at the hardware level (many headsets have a button for that), or at the OS level (many keyboards have a button for that).

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

#324

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…

> user experience

The “Think of the children!” Of privacy violators.

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

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Where does it say that the code was audited? And where does it say who did it?

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

#327

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…

Yeah pretty much. How exactly do people expect the "you appear to be muted and talking" notification to work... exactly? eye roll

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

#328

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.

Couldn’t this be done by using some ML on the video stream?

- Is device X receiving input

vs

- Training models, wasting years of CPU cycle world wide, &c.

For such a dumb feature... I just don't see the point

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

#329
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure why they don't say which one Yeah, that's very annoying. Zoom, for example, will tell you, when you are muted and you begin to speak. It's a very nice thing. I have a microphone (that wasn't expensive) that has a hardware mute. I use it when I really want to make sure I'm not heard, even for "speaking" detection.

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

Quite interestingly the only laptops I've seen with such a feature (button to mute and LED to display the mic is muted) are huawei's matebooks. Some of them also have the camera under a keyboard button, extremely weird angle but when the camera is hidden you can be 100% sure you are not being recorded.

The mic mute button of course works at the OS level but still...

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