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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

#341

Post by mywittyname »

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 am not deaf, but a family member of mine is a studied American Sign Language in college and worked as an interpreter and we've discussed this topic a few times at length.

Some interesting take-aways I have from discussing this:

* Sign language communication is very different. We can speak with our mouths much faster than we can manipulate our hands, so fewer words are used. I have to imagine this means that the words that are used are far more significant.

* Names are interesting. Most people names don't have signs, and signing every letter would be annoying, so apparently people get nicknames made up of descriptive words. So, you might go by "tall mustache" in normal conversation, but you're 10u152 in writing.

People wouldn't write the same way they would sign. ASL is a completely different language and direct translations to written English modifies the meaning of a lot of statements.

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

#343

Post by soheil »

oauea wrote: post #161
soheil wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most OS's don't very visibly indicate whether the mic is muted or not, only the speakers.

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

#344

Post by yencabulator »

andmarios wrote: post #329
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.

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...

https://frame.work/ hardware toggles disconnect the built-in microphone and camera from the USB bus.

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

#345

Post by alanh »

"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."

Sure would be nice if they named and shamed, with an opportunity for the company to comment as well.

I can imagine adaptive video rates eating up the freed bandwidth, but I would not bet on it. I would bet the audio was indeed being sent even on mute.

Pretty unforgivable

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

#346

Post by bearbearbear »

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…

No post body was provided.

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

#347

Post by jfalcon »

I have a older logitech "speakerphone" microphone that I normally use for video calls and the like as people have commented that it sounds better than the mic that is built into the webcam. One of the nice things about it is that you can touch a "mute" function and the LEDs around the edge of the speaker that usually will light up for a volume dial indicator will turn "red" when it is "muted". And I have found that it does track whether or not the session is muted or not.

Whether or not an application is correctly using the functionality or they try to do something sneaky like using a mute function on app to trigger a "cut audio" function on the server side of the video conference is one of the reasons why I use the speakermicrophone. That visual indicator is usually linked to the Audio Subsystem and with the speakermicrophone being a 1st tier HID device for audio purposes, makes it more likely that things are working as they should.

When it doesn't light up and I'm intentional on the mute is when I would worry.

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

#348

Post by p1necone »

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…

I don't know about this, Zoom has been taking over the enterprise world and they have /awful/ security.

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

#349

Post by Tagbert »

lxgr wrote: post #29

At least as far as not giving up microphone access is concerned, when using Bluetooth headphones, this is very much desirable: Deactivating the microphone usually is seen as a signal by the OS to switch Bluetooth headphones from two-way conferencing mode (low latency, mediocre quality) back to "music" mode (high latency, good quality). This usually takes 2-3 seconds and disrupts all sound being played (most notably o…

I’ve often used Bluetooth headphones with a physical microphone switch (boom arm up) and there is never any disruption to the audio output.

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

#350

Post by martibravo »

andrei_says_ wrote: post #210
e40 wrote: 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.

My ASUS laptop has a dedicated mute mic button, not a key, on top of the keyboard.
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