There are other reasons to capture the mic (for example, to display a message to you that you are speaking while muted). Or to test the audio settings prior to unmuting yourself in the meeting.
You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
211–220 of 353 posts
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#212One valid use case for this is for the software to detect when you're speaking while on mute and notify you that "you're on mute". Maybe I dreamed it up, but I thought I've seen this before (WebEx?).
I could imagine a soft-mute feature where you're on mute when you're not talking (perhaps to keep down on background noise) but if your app detects that you're actively talking, it will unmute you. It might lose the first word or two that you say but could be effective. I could also see this going horribly awry when someone thinks they are on mute rather than soft mute and say something Biden-esque, like "what a stupid son of a bitch".
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#213I 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…
There's no cost to privacy if it's all being written to /dev/null. I'm not worried because the cost benefit analysis is not even remotely in the video conferencing app's favor to listen to that traffic. Are they really going to use the compute time to analyze all this audio, then do what? Try and monetize data on what people are doing in the background of their video calls?
The technical cost of deploying this is probably large, and the cost to reputation immense if they were caught doing this. By comparison, giving people the additional sense of privacy by actually turning off and on the mic is likely more than outweighed by the annoyance of lag between turning on and off your mic and being heard by the other chat members.
Although they could do something like write random bits of audio to the stream when the mic is muted in software. That'd at least let users know that the actual audio isn't leaving their device. But the hardware peripheral activation is probably not going to go away.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#214Earlier 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…
Considering the trouble I have with WebEx again and again UX indeed comes late.
I often call it "golf-course-ware" the sales person goes golfing with the executive, they discuss features and prices and discounts ober the match and the executive typically doesn't have to use the software but only their employees or the assistant.
Interestingly Zoom for me was a game changer in usability and it spread during pandemic, when executives where at home partially without their physical conference room with video conf setup and without assistant.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#215Earlier 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?
> You see it a lot here on HN and occasionally in media It makes some sense here on HN where people often post under their real names and want to think carefully before badmouthing a former employer, or otherwise picking a fight. I agree that journalists have little excuse.
> I agree that journalists have little excuse.
Except wanting anyone, ever to talk to them again about something controversial.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#216That's why I have a powered mike with a physical switch.
The web cam has a hinged lense cover.
The background picture is of the office, taken from the exact POV of the web cam, when it was clean. That way it is not necessary to straighten out the office before video conferencing.
It also causes the weird behavior of looking like I am "beaming in" to the office from my orbiting starship :-) Or maybe it's just a glitch in the simulation of myself that has long since replaced me.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
End-to-End encryption for group video and audio is now supported. I'm not sure it works or who is supporting besides Signal, but it is apparently not not required that the conference provider decrypt the streams to mix them. https://mashable.com/article/signal-end-to-end-encrypted-gro...
> it is apparently not not required that the conference provider decrypt the streams to mix them I don't believe this could be true, and the linked article doesn't have the word "mix" anywhere. I imagine that there is no mixing happening until after decryption on the client device. Of course this means that every audio source goes to each recipient discretely, which means more bandwidth, but audio (especially near-si…
That's correct. You can't mix without decrypting. Signal does not mix at the server because it can't.
More info is available at my blog post about it: https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#218> “With a camera, you can turn it off or even put your hand over it, and no matter what you do, no one can see you,” says Fawaz. “I don’t think that exists for microphones.” Maybe it doesn't exist on whatever sleek glassy slabs they're working with, but the old Thinkpad, Elitebook, and Precision workstation laptops I have around me at the moment all have dedicated microphone mute buttons (the Precision has a Fn key c…
Do these mute buttons actually hardware-mute the mic or do they send a keycode to the OS?
They seem to do both, at least on some models? On my thinkpad running openbsd, the speaker mute can become desynced. Audio won't play unless both are unmuted. Pushing the button will flip flop the software state, but not the reverse (although I believe that code could be written, it doesn't exist). So if you soft mute, then push button, hardware mutes and software unmutes, but sound still doesn't play.
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#219Earlier 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.
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)
Re: You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off
#220Earlier 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.
> Zoom, for example, will tell you, when you are muted and you begin to speak MS Teams has that feature too. TBH I'm not surprised: when you mute the mic in an app, you're still letting the app in control. If you really want to be safe, you need to mute at OS level or in hardware. That's why cameras have a hardware cover in modern laptops.
The apps can control the sound devices at the OS level too. But fortunately most(/all) don't, so muting in the sound server / OS is generally safe.