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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

#131

Post by someweirdperson »

With some poor power saving implementations keeping the mike on can make sense. Switching the power back on when reactivating the mike may cause noticable stutter. An application with limited permissions might not be able to turn the mike off without dropping the device to some low power state.

Being in a conference, muted, hearing something that requires action, hitting "unmute", freeze for a second... bad thing.

A hardware switch would be the better option. But then people wanting to hear you cannot inform you about still being muted.

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

#132

Post by victimblamer »

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…

> How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy?

I manage some properties for a family member on the side, one of which is in a very bad neighborhood. When I travel to this neighborhood I have a certain state of alertness that I would not normally have in my boring suburbistani neighborhood. This is better known as "situational awareness" - the man approaching me in my own neighborhood is likely a just having a friendly conversation, the man approaching me in bad neighborhood is guaranteed going to at least try to bum a smoke off me, which I don't have as I don't smoke, and will likely act belligerent if I refuse to give him money as a follow-on to the request for a smoke.

Contextually, I expect a video conferencing software to be listening to and watching me even if it doesn't necessarily reflect in the UI, it has the capability and is actively meant to do so. As such, I explicitly don't have any form of sensitive conversation in the vicinity regardless of status. On the other hand, I do not expect it to do so when not running nor my laptop to do anything similar.

Perhaps there is a legitimate criticism to be made here of poor UX around "not listening" - but to paint this as an "extremely concerning" issue is sky-is-falling critique. This over-the-top concern seems further alarmist in that both my laptop and phone display clear and obvious warnings to the user when the microphone is hot.

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

#133

Post by thaumasiotes »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #114
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…

> How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy? Because they're not actually doing that? These researchers did everything they could think of to come up with the most concerning headline. I imagine someone, somewhere is going to make a video conferencing app that closes the audio interface every time you press mute. I also expect few people will use that option because it adds additional l…

> and I don't believe Zoom (or anyone else) is interested in whether or not I'm eating while muted.

If they are, the continuing video feed is pretty likely to answer their question.

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

#134

Post by phillipseamore »

gwbas1c wrote: post #106
Isthatablackgsd wrote: post #97

As a Deaf person, the notification annoyed the heck out of me and there are not even an option to disable the notification. I muted my mic because I am Deaf and I don't use my voice to communicate with my fellow Deaf friends over Zoom/Teams. And there is no option to disable Zoom joining-room audio (the one that when you join the room, Zoom present the option to ask which microphone you want to enable). Why would I n…

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?

Sign language is an actual independent language.

Most sign at the same pace as speech. Both of which are faster than typing.

Sign language has the same, or more, expressive properties as when we use inflection etc. in voice.

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

#136

Post by lrem »

Veserv wrote: post #98
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…

Okay, given that they are not listening for any insidious purpose, they should all just add a legally binding, unrevokable clause to their all of their terms of service indicating that they will never sell any audio data or data derived from the audio data while the microphone is muted. Absent that, it is entirely legal for them to do so at any time for any reason with no consequences, so I see no reason why we shoul…

Would you use a service that sells your audio data when unmuted? :/

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

#137

Post by chefandy »

ortusdux wrote: post #120
nemothekid wrote: post #85

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; 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…

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.

Mostly agree. Price has a higher weight than UX but a bad enough UX will succumb to reasonably priced competitors.

Anecdotally, privacy/security seem to be on the bottom of the stack. Platform support and necessity for work are above them all.

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

#138

Post by knbrlo »

Assuming the app that's using the microphone would still need to have hardware access to be able to switch back on when someone unmutes themselves, couldn't there be a higher level API within the OS that still allowed hardware access but wouldn't allow input through so that the audio couldn't be captured in third party apps? Seems like this is an OS issue that Microsoft, Apple and Linux team need to work on if that isn't already the case.

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

#139

Post by julienb_sea »

ortusdux wrote: post #120
nemothekid wrote: post #85

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; 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…

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 messenger calls, facetime, etc.

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

#140

Post by Aunche »

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…

Most of the time, audio that a videoconference app receives while the mic is unmuted is going to be a lot more useful for surveillance purposes than the audio the app receives while it's muted. If you're so concerned about the app knowing when you're eating 82% of the time, why would you trust the app at all?
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