<story><title>You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off</title><url>https://news.wisc.edu/youre-muted-or-are-you-videoconferencing-apps-may-listen-even-when-mic-is-off/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sakos</author><text>Honestly, it feels like most people here aren&amp;#x27;t reading the article.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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, typing and cleaning. Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending, the team could identify the background activity with an average of 82% accuracy.&lt;p&gt;How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy?&lt;p&gt;How about we not make the default that companies can do whatever they want and users have to take steps like a hardware-muted mic (which isn&amp;#x27;t always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy?</text></item><item><author>SkyPuncher</author><text>I feel like they&amp;#x27;re trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there&amp;#x27;s likely a good reason - user experience.&lt;p&gt;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 software level. This way the mic is always hot and ready to relay audio as fast as the software can switch.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d be somewhat willing to bet continue to stream audio is also a quality assurance mechanism. Some networks will shape traffic according to load. A quick jump in bandwidth can introduce unexpected jitter and latency. By continuing to stream audio (but not necessarily process or re-transmit), video conferencing can better ensure an un-interupted experience.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;With that being said, if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ghostpepper</author><text>&amp;quot;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.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted. I&amp;#x27;m not sure why they don&amp;#x27;t  say which one, and I&amp;#x27;m not sure what is meant by &amp;quot;occasionally gather raw audio data&amp;quot; but it could be as innocuous as the mute button not updating and a half second of audio being sent before muting starts. Nobody is building a machine learning profile out of that.&lt;p&gt;The real story here should be that one app where the mute button doesn&amp;#x27;t actually work. The others are all operating normally as far as I can tell.</text></comment>
<story><title>You’re muted – or are you? Videoconferencing apps may listen when mic is off</title><url>https://news.wisc.edu/youre-muted-or-are-you-videoconferencing-apps-may-listen-even-when-mic-is-off/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Sakos</author><text>Honestly, it feels like most people here aren&amp;#x27;t reading the article.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; 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, typing and cleaning. Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending, the team could identify the background activity with an average of 82% accuracy.&lt;p&gt;How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy?&lt;p&gt;How about we not make the default that companies can do whatever they want and users have to take steps like a hardware-muted mic (which isn&amp;#x27;t always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy?</text></item><item><author>SkyPuncher</author><text>I feel like they&amp;#x27;re trying to make an insidious suggestion about the usage of these. IMO, there&amp;#x27;s likely a good reason - user experience.&lt;p&gt;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 software level. This way the mic is always hot and ready to relay audio as fast as the software can switch.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;d be somewhat willing to bet continue to stream audio is also a quality assurance mechanism. Some networks will shape traffic according to load. A quick jump in bandwidth can introduce unexpected jitter and latency. By continuing to stream audio (but not necessarily process or re-transmit), video conferencing can better ensure an un-interupted experience.&lt;p&gt;----&lt;p&gt;With that being said, if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nemothekid</author><text>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.&lt;p&gt;There should be a line between &amp;quot;companies doing whatever they want&amp;quot; because of some implied &amp;quot;nefarious&amp;quot; reasons, and &amp;quot;companies doing whatever they want&amp;quot; because their customers want a better experience even if it has security&amp;#x2F;privacy implications.</text></comment>