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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,

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 software level. This way the mic is always hot and ready to relay audio as fast as the software can switch. I'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. ---- With that being said, if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone.

Godel_unicode 5y ago
Teams has a notice that it pops up if you're talking and on mute, and there's another for if you're not on mute but your mic is producing no signal (mic has it's own mute). I find those super helpful, personally.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  Yeah, Meet does the same thing. I find it annoying, because I am muted because the kids are making a bunch of noise, not because I am trying to talk. I am muting because I don't want the sound in my room broadcasted... if it was silent, I wouldn't have to mute!
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    In like 25% of my meetings, somebody is accidentally muted while they are trying to speak. The popup speeds up the process of them unmuting.
    - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
      I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever turned off). Not to mention push-to-talk has solved this issue for almost a few decades now.
      - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
        >I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Because 1) most group calls that need people to be on mute most of the time are useless, boring, snooze fests, most attendees don't care about, so those 'professionals', who are caffeinated zombies half asleep, will space out and forget the status of their mic within 10 seconds of toggling it and 2) most chat apps suck at drawing attention to the status of the mic and, if you have multiple monitors, you can be staring at one monitor (Jira, reddit, Redmine, HN, VS Code, etc.) while the chat app and the status of the mic is being displayed on another monitor where you're not looking It's a mistake super easy to make. Still, better be safe and make the mistake of being muted all the time, than forgetting to mute yourself and have participants hear something you didn't want them to hear. Ideally I'd want a feature that gives the image on all my monitors a nuclear red vignette, or something like that, whenever my mic is hot, so I don't have to keep paranoidly glancing at the mute toggle every couple of minutes, to make sure my mic is still muted, so they can't hear me mumbling on how incompetent management is and on how useless this meeting is.
      - someweirdperson 5y ago
        People are not communication professionals. They are not ATC nor even pilots. Still, PTT is the solution, preferrably in hardware. Not supported in sw anyway by e.g. Teams. In hw it keeps the mike-on symbol lit, and the device powered. Always having to push prevents ever forgetting to do so. Discord's input handler sucks, uses semantic keys, not keycodes. Can't be mapped to an otherwise disabled capslock. TS and mumble can do that. Compared with those Teams audio looks like a toy.
- BeFlatXIII 5y ago
  My mic has a physical mute switch and it causes all kinds of problems with auto-leveling in videoconferences. Even with the switch left on, the mic itself rejects enough background noise to cause problems for the software that assumes half-broken built-in condenser mics.
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  I hate the latter, because I use a keyboard shortcut to mute/unmute the microphone on the OS-level. This works fine with Google Meet, but in Microsoft Teams I have to use the button in its UI because that pop-up gets in the way (also: Teams not working at all in Firefox, what's up with that?).
  - Arnavion 5y ago
    Yes, I have the exact same situation, and had to resort to uBlock Origin's element zapper because of how annoying that popup is. Of course it's an alphabet soup of minified CSS classes, so I assume it'll break the next time they update the UI.
    - ineptech 5y ago
      I know! Eight zillion designer-hours in to one of the most-used applications of all time, and yet the "you can join now" popup blocks the "join" button.
  - prettyStandard 5y ago
    It's BS. I changed my user agent to Chrome and it worked just fine.
    - zelphirkalt 5y ago
      It is BS, but when I tried that, I had other things not working, like sharing my screen. So it is BS, but not merely for looking at the user agent of the browser, but for the software development incapability or unwillingness on the side of MS. (Edit: While basically every other voice chat / video chat web app works fine on FF, so basically everyone but MS and Slack has solved this problem years ago. Go figure.)
      - nyuszika7h 5y ago
        GoToMeeting also refuses to work in Firefox.
  - 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago
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- wbobeirne 5y ago
  I also considered this, but the article is talking about audio _telemetry_, not that they're keeping your hardware mic "hot" locally. Audio detection like that could be done entirely locally.
vladvasiliu 5y ago
On Linux at least, Teams continue to grab the microphone even after the meeting has ended. You can see this by looking at apps registered for "recording". I'm not sure how that can be justified. Besides privacy, the issue is that this prevents the sound card from going to sleep, which may be an issue on laptops. But I guess this is insignificant compared to the rest of Teams' power consumption.
- _notathrowaway 5y ago
  Teams is a real clustefuck, I do not believe it is a design decision but rather just poorly written code.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    From the outside perspective, this must be true. Recently I have noticed, that Teams, unlike any other app I tried, is unable to properly distinguish between stereo and mic, when that arrives both at the headset jack (made for both, stereo and mic) of my laptop. When I switch in Teams to use that as mic, it means, that others hear themselves and do not hear me. I tried everything, but Teams is simply unable to take the proper mic input from the headset jack, while an app like audacity has no issue at all. Teams is utter garbage. Found topics on MS websites, where people are describing similar problems. The answers usually are: "Well, it is MS, what do you expect?" and no solution in sight. In the year. 2000 and 22. And this is what I am forced to deal with. So I had to go back to only have the output on headset jack and use the laptop internal mic, which very likely has much worse quality than my external on the desk standing microphone, which I am effectively unable to use, because I have to use Teams... This stuff can drive you crazy. Each month there is some new annoyance or broken part, that I discover.
    - vladvasiliu 5y ago
      I've never had your particular issue, but my favorite has got to be that it somehow "loses" the mic between conferences, although the sound server shows it as still recording... I can understand not detecting something, or badly, but if it works now, and then on the next conference it figures "nah, there's no mic", I just can't understand what it does.
connicpu 5y ago
Completely agree, there's a lot of user friendly reasons to want the software to behave this way. I use a headset with a hardware mute that engages when I put the mic arm up, that's what I use when I want to make sure I'm muted.
David 5y ago
Very much this, it takes time to recapture the microphone and it's really annoying to lose the first part of what you say every time you unmute. I lead the video team at a videoconferencing app (gather.town) and we keep the microphone active when you mute for this reason. As seems to be pretty common, for the sake of privacy we do stop sending audio to the media server. That's a tradeoff, since we're still susceptible to losing a little bit while the audio connection resumes. Edit: as others have mentioned, also useful to keep bluetooth headsets in two-way audio mode rather than reverting to audio output mode, since that's really disruptive.
- sillysaurusx 5y ago
  Shoutout to gathertown. Love what you’re doing.
- jimmygrapes 5y ago
  Just throwing it out there but maybe to avoid bandwidth spikes that might lead to latency depending on the setup, could you inject some kind of easily identifiable "is muted" signal along with white noise in place of silences? or would that sort of pre-mixing be too slow to do in real time on the client side?
pigtailgirl 5y ago
got a modmic - popular mic - has a button on it to mute the mic- light turns red - pushed the button and went for a pee - came back to the meeting - left again to get a drink - came back - was asked to mute my mic - light was red - clicked hardware button - red light turned off - clicked again - right light turned on - mic was still active - no longer trust hardware buttons
- novok 5y ago
  That is a button that works via software, not a physical disconnect like on some other mics. When its a physical disconnect the os can’t tell if you’ve sent a mute command, just that all audio input stopped.
- Karrot_Kream 5y ago
  Not all mics are like this. I have a Corsair gaming headset which has a hardware mute button. I frequently set it on mute when I'm munching on something, forget to unmute, and despite videoconferencing software and the OS thinking the Mic is unmuted, no signal is detected.
oriolid 5y ago
The worst part is that on iOS you can't just start and stop input stream separately from output, but you have to stop the entire audio session and restart it in output only category. You can configure the session to ignore all input channels, but that won't get rid of the mic indicator (or at least didn't back when the mic indicator was introduced in the first place). Yes, I work on an app that keeps the mic running all the time because of the above, and because ASIO doesn't allow disabling input at all.
SllX 5y ago
It’s something to be aware of. The first time I had ever heard of Zoom, it was long before the pandemic and it was about how Zoom was a videoconferencing app that was installing an http server (read, a security hole on the user’s computer) which remained even if you deleted the app. This was to “improve the user experience” so that it could quickly reinstall itself if you clicked one of their web widgets to start a call. It’s worth checking in on exactly what software is doing in the background, auditing its activity and coming to a more precise understanding of 1. The reputation of the company behind it and 2. How they came to have this reputation and whether it is still relevant.
- trelane 5y ago
  My first introduction to Zoom was their malware-like pre-install install. https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193 https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193
  - SllX 5y ago
    That was March 2020? This is from July 2019: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/07/10/zoom https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/07/10/zoom After they were called out, supposedly they fixed it, but that tweet you just linked looks like more of the same nonsense which goes right back to my original point: reputation matters. If the first could be taken as honestly naïve, the second proves it was not. Zoom doesn’t go on anything I own or control.
    - trelane 5y ago
      Yep. I don't trust them at all.
    - GekkePrutser 5y ago
      For me the problem was that they were called out about the backdoor they installed on Macs, and then totally refused to do anything about it, and it took Apple to actually incorporate a system update to remove Zoom's malware. I understand 'mistakes' happen (though this was way too elaborate to be a mistake). But to just shrug it off and refuse to do anything when it's discovered is just total ignorance of security.
Sakos 5y ago
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, 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. How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy? 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't always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy?
- georgyo 5y ago
  I think there are two different problem here. 1. When the mic is soft muted, information is getting sent to the conference provider which could leak information about private matters. 2. When the mic is not muted all information is definitely going to the conference provider in a way they can decrypt so they can mix it. That is to say that when using most conference software, you have already granted then access to contents of the meeting. If you can't trust them to not miss use information they get when the mic is off, then you also can't trust them when the mic is on.
  - markstos 5y ago
    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-group-video-calls https://mashable.com/article/signal-end-to-end-encrypted-gro...
    - KennyBlanken 5y ago
      Element/Matrix also support e2ee. Jitsi has supposed e2ee videoconferencing (on Chrome - they used some chrome-specific API for processing) for (I believe) at least a year or two.
macintux 5y ago
> With that being said, if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone. But still consider using both software and hardware mutes. I was on a sales call years ago and activated the hardware mute. While one of our salespeople was talking I groaned out loud, and the call suddenly went silent. Somehow the hardware mute had failed, despite the light being lit.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
> 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. Another solution is to mute at the microphone, if your hardware has a button for that. This way the application can do whatever it wants, it will still get nothing. Using the hardware button is often less effort, than switching windows, finding that unmute button visually and moving the mouse to that button to click it. Or one could use push to talk. Since there are ways to mute yourself without having to do it in the app, it would be acceptable, if unmuting took a part of a second to be effective, indicating that by some "unmuting ..." label somewhere.
Veserv 5y ago
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 should take the word of a amoral entity that pinky swears they will not do so when a legally binding statement is so much cleaner and more straightforward.
- lrem 5y ago
  Would you use a service that sells your audio data when unmuted? :/
admax88qqq 5y ago
Not to mention the feature of notifying a user they are muted if it sounds like they're trying to talk.
Dig1t 5y ago
You are right that the problems you listed are easily solved by keeping the mic open/streaming. If you actually value privacy as a company though, these are all very solvable problems.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone" Even if you get an external microphone which can be muted, if you're on a laptop you'll still have an internal microphone which can't be muted except through software. What we really need are laptops sold without microphones and cameras. Then you can just use external ones only, and be sure that no one's listening/looking when you unplug them.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Usually software only captures one mic at a time.
- chaxor 5y ago
  Unfortunately, even if a company offered this, in today's world the product would likely have a hidden microphone that isn't listed on the featured hardware. Much like the old physical typewriters had spyware hidden on them without the users knowledge. I would be willing to bet that every keyboard has something similar today. It's also striking to see how many people believe that they can trust the 'little indicator lights' on their microphone and cameras to actually indicate that their physically cut off from power. Very, very few devices are made in a way that this is true, and I would be hard pressed to believe it even if it was started in a manual unless I physically checked the equipment. Ultimately, just assume that the entire world can scrutinize everything that happens on or around any electronic device... so everything, all the time.
- PeterStuer 5y ago
  Technically any speaker can also potentially be used as a microphone.
neura 5y ago
It's simple. Most video conferencing apps that I've used will let you know that your mic is muted when you try to speak and your mic is muted. If you think they're doing something else, then don't use it. If you think you don't have a choice because your employer requires you to use it, your choice is not in whether or not to use the software. If it's something you care about, there's always a choice.
asxd 5y ago
I don't think an application has to actually do anything with the audio data in order to retain its access to the microphone. I'm not an expert here, but I'd imagine it's something like this: mic = grab_access_to_mic() while app_is_running: if (is_muted): pass else: send_that_audio(mic) It also mentions some of the apps sending the muted audio "to the cloud", which seems completely unrelated to retaining access to the mic. Also, seems like an honest mistake, but I think they got this backwards, right? > They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular videoconferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted. Wouldn't it be driver -> app -> cloud? I think I'm splitting hairs at this point though. Lastly, it would be nice if this article at least listed the apps that were investigated.
nanoservices 5y ago
Exactly the reason I use a headset with a boom mic. Flip it up to mute, and back down to activate. Love it.
- sizzle 5y ago
  wait till the wear and tear on that hinge breaks from doing this 50 times a day lol
zarzavat 5y ago
> I'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. They don't have to actually send the data though in this case they should just send 0 padding. It's all encrypted presumably, so the only externally observable factor is the packet size.
rob_c 5y ago
have to agree, it's not well explained, but hardly seems like a smoking gun that google/zoom/skype are listening out for anti-government hysteria...
hndamien 5y ago
It could also be for background noise suppression when unmuted. This isn't a giant privacy concern, just be clear about what the mute button actual does for all the privacy people. Generally, when I'm on a Zoom call, I'm not expecting ridiculously high privacy, and expect my recipient and the service to have access to the conversation. If not, I would use Session.
pishpash 5y ago
Or how about an OS-level software mute? Like you have for muting the speaker.
megous 5y ago
At the hardware level, it takes 0 time (10's of microseconds at most for I2C connected codecs, maybe a millisecond for USB 2.0 sound card) to mute the mic input channel to the mixer sitting before the A/D converter. If it takes any more than 0 time, it's caused by badly written software. I wouldn't blame the HW for the privacy issues, here.
ajsnigrutin 5y ago
Yep, plus on many apps, if you're speaking while muted, a popup/toaster will show, notifying you that you're muted and if you want to unmute.
andylynch 5y ago
I never enjoyed Lync/ Skype for business but one thing it did right was supporting mute on headsets in sync with the app.
Razengan 5y ago
> user experience The “Think of the children!” Of privacy violators.
ikiris 5y ago
Yeah pretty much. How exactly do people expect the "you appear to be muted and talking" notification to work... exactly? eye roll

Godel_unicode 5y ago

Teams has a notice that it pops up if you're talking and on mute, and there's another for if you're not on mute but your mic is producing no signal (mic has it's own mute). I find those super helpful, personally.

cortesoft 5y ago
Yeah, Meet does the same thing. I find it annoying, because I am muted because the kids are making a bunch of noise, not because I am trying to talk. I am muting because I don't want the sound in my room broadcasted... if it was silent, I wouldn't have to mute!
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  In like 25% of my meetings, somebody is accidentally muted while they are trying to speak. The popup speeds up the process of them unmuting.
  - BlargMcLarg 5y ago
    I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Having used Discord for so many years, this has never been a problem aside from a select few people who had very clear reason to mute themselves. Meanwhile in professional settings, people seem to be falling for this over and over while lacking the common curtesy of not letting random environmental noise bleed through (read: their mics are barely ever turned off). Not to mention push-to-talk has solved this issue for almost a few decades now.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
      >I still don't know how professionals keep making this mistake. Because 1) most group calls that need people to be on mute most of the time are useless, boring, snooze fests, most attendees don't care about, so those 'professionals', who are caffeinated zombies half asleep, will space out and forget the status of their mic within 10 seconds of toggling it and 2) most chat apps suck at drawing attention to the status of the mic and, if you have multiple monitors, you can be staring at one monitor (Jira, reddit, Redmine, HN, VS Code, etc.) while the chat app and the status of the mic is being displayed on another monitor where you're not looking It's a mistake super easy to make. Still, better be safe and make the mistake of being muted all the time, than forgetting to mute yourself and have participants hear something you didn't want them to hear. Ideally I'd want a feature that gives the image on all my monitors a nuclear red vignette, or something like that, whenever my mic is hot, so I don't have to keep paranoidly glancing at the mute toggle every couple of minutes, to make sure my mic is still muted, so they can't hear me mumbling on how incompetent management is and on how useless this meeting is.
    - someweirdperson 5y ago
      People are not communication professionals. They are not ATC nor even pilots. Still, PTT is the solution, preferrably in hardware. Not supported in sw anyway by e.g. Teams. In hw it keeps the mike-on symbol lit, and the device powered. Always having to push prevents ever forgetting to do so. Discord's input handler sucks, uses semantic keys, not keycodes. Can't be mapped to an otherwise disabled capslock. TS and mumble can do that. Compared with those Teams audio looks like a toy.
BeFlatXIII 5y ago
My mic has a physical mute switch and it causes all kinds of problems with auto-leveling in videoconferences. Even with the switch left on, the mic itself rejects enough background noise to cause problems for the software that assumes half-broken built-in condenser mics.
Freak_NL 5y ago
I hate the latter, because I use a keyboard shortcut to mute/unmute the microphone on the OS-level. This works fine with Google Meet, but in Microsoft Teams I have to use the button in its UI because that pop-up gets in the way (also: Teams not working at all in Firefox, what's up with that?).
- Arnavion 5y ago
  Yes, I have the exact same situation, and had to resort to uBlock Origin's element zapper because of how annoying that popup is. Of course it's an alphabet soup of minified CSS classes, so I assume it'll break the next time they update the UI.
  - ineptech 5y ago
    I know! Eight zillion designer-hours in to one of the most-used applications of all time, and yet the "you can join now" popup blocks the "join" button.
- prettyStandard 5y ago
  It's BS. I changed my user agent to Chrome and it worked just fine.
  - zelphirkalt 5y ago
    It is BS, but when I tried that, I had other things not working, like sharing my screen. So it is BS, but not merely for looking at the user agent of the browser, but for the software development incapability or unwillingness on the side of MS. (Edit: While basically every other voice chat / video chat web app works fine on FF, so basically everyone but MS and Slack has solved this problem years ago. Go figure.)
    - nyuszika7h 5y ago
      GoToMeeting also refuses to work in Firefox.
- 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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wbobeirne 5y ago
I also considered this, but the article is talking about audio _telemetry_, not that they're keeping your hardware mic "hot" locally. Audio detection like that could be done entirely locally.

vladvasiliu 5y ago

On Linux at least, Teams continue to grab the microphone even after the meeting has ended. You can see this by looking at apps registered for "recording". I'm not sure how that can be justified. Besides privacy, the issue is that this prevents the sound card from going to sleep, which may be an issue on laptops. But I guess this is insignificant compared to the rest of Teams' power consumption.

_notathrowaway 5y ago
Teams is a real clustefuck, I do not believe it is a design decision but rather just poorly written code.
- zelphirkalt 5y ago
  From the outside perspective, this must be true. Recently I have noticed, that Teams, unlike any other app I tried, is unable to properly distinguish between stereo and mic, when that arrives both at the headset jack (made for both, stereo and mic) of my laptop. When I switch in Teams to use that as mic, it means, that others hear themselves and do not hear me. I tried everything, but Teams is simply unable to take the proper mic input from the headset jack, while an app like audacity has no issue at all. Teams is utter garbage. Found topics on MS websites, where people are describing similar problems. The answers usually are: "Well, it is MS, what do you expect?" and no solution in sight. In the year. 2000 and 22. And this is what I am forced to deal with. So I had to go back to only have the output on headset jack and use the laptop internal mic, which very likely has much worse quality than my external on the desk standing microphone, which I am effectively unable to use, because I have to use Teams... This stuff can drive you crazy. Each month there is some new annoyance or broken part, that I discover.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    I've never had your particular issue, but my favorite has got to be that it somehow "loses" the mic between conferences, although the sound server shows it as still recording... I can understand not detecting something, or badly, but if it works now, and then on the next conference it figures "nah, there's no mic", I just can't understand what it does.

connicpu 5y ago

Completely agree, there's a lot of user friendly reasons to want the software to behave this way. I use a headset with a hardware mute that engages when I put the mic arm up, that's what I use when I want to make sure I'm muted.

David 5y ago

Very much this, it takes time to recapture the microphone and it's really annoying to lose the first part of what you say every time you unmute. I lead the video team at a videoconferencing app (gather.town) and we keep the microphone active when you mute for this reason. As seems to be pretty common, for the sake of privacy we do stop sending audio to the media server. That's a tradeoff, since we're still susceptible to losing a little bit while the audio connection resumes. Edit: as others have mentioned, also useful to keep bluetooth headsets in two-way audio mode rather than reverting to audio output mode, since that's really disruptive.

sillysaurusx 5y ago
Shoutout to gathertown. Love what you’re doing.
jimmygrapes 5y ago
Just throwing it out there but maybe to avoid bandwidth spikes that might lead to latency depending on the setup, could you inject some kind of easily identifiable "is muted" signal along with white noise in place of silences? or would that sort of pre-mixing be too slow to do in real time on the client side?

pigtailgirl 5y ago

got a modmic - popular mic - has a button on it to mute the mic- light turns red - pushed the button and went for a pee - came back to the meeting - left again to get a drink - came back - was asked to mute my mic - light was red - clicked hardware button - red light turned off - clicked again - right light turned on - mic was still active - no longer trust hardware buttons

novok 5y ago
That is a button that works via software, not a physical disconnect like on some other mics. When its a physical disconnect the os can’t tell if you’ve sent a mute command, just that all audio input stopped.
Karrot_Kream 5y ago
Not all mics are like this. I have a Corsair gaming headset which has a hardware mute button. I frequently set it on mute when I'm munching on something, forget to unmute, and despite videoconferencing software and the OS thinking the Mic is unmuted, no signal is detected.

oriolid 5y ago

The worst part is that on iOS you can't just start and stop input stream separately from output, but you have to stop the entire audio session and restart it in output only category. You can configure the session to ignore all input channels, but that won't get rid of the mic indicator (or at least didn't back when the mic indicator was introduced in the first place). Yes, I work on an app that keeps the mic running all the time because of the above, and because ASIO doesn't allow disabling input at all.

SllX 5y ago

It’s something to be aware of. The first time I had ever heard of Zoom, it was long before the pandemic and it was about how Zoom was a videoconferencing app that was installing an http server (read, a security hole on the user’s computer) which remained even if you deleted the app. This was to “improve the user experience” so that it could quickly reinstall itself if you clicked one of their web widgets to start a call. It’s worth checking in on exactly what software is doing in the background, auditing its activity and coming to a more precise understanding of 1. The reputation of the company behind it and 2. How they came to have this reputation and whether it is still relevant.

trelane 5y ago
My first introduction to Zoom was their malware-like pre-install install. https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193 https://twitter.com/c1truz_/status/1244737672930824193
- SllX 5y ago
  That was March 2020? This is from July 2019: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/07/10/zoom https://daringfireball.net/linked/2019/07/10/zoom After they were called out, supposedly they fixed it, but that tweet you just linked looks like more of the same nonsense which goes right back to my original point: reputation matters. If the first could be taken as honestly naïve, the second proves it was not. Zoom doesn’t go on anything I own or control.
  - trelane 5y ago
    Yep. I don't trust them at all.
  - GekkePrutser 5y ago
    For me the problem was that they were called out about the backdoor they installed on Macs, and then totally refused to do anything about it, and it took Apple to actually incorporate a system update to remove Zoom's malware. I understand 'mistakes' happen (though this was way too elaborate to be a mistake). But to just shrug it off and refuse to do anything when it's discovered is just total ignorance of security.

Sakos 5y ago

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, 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. How is this not extremely concerning for anybody who cares about privacy? 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't always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy?

georgyo 5y ago
I think there are two different problem here. 1. When the mic is soft muted, information is getting sent to the conference provider which could leak information about private matters. 2. When the mic is not muted all information is definitely going to the conference provider in a way they can decrypt so they can mix it. That is to say that when using most conference software, you have already granted then access to contents of the meeting. If you can't trust them to not miss use information they get when the mic is off, then you also can't trust them when the mic is on.
- markstos 5y ago
  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-group-video-calls https://mashable.com/article/signal-end-to-end-encrypted-gro...
  - KennyBlanken 5y ago
    Element/Matrix also support e2ee. Jitsi has supposed e2ee videoconferencing (on Chrome - they used some chrome-specific API for processing) for (I believe) at least a year or two.

macintux 5y ago

> With that being said, if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone. But still consider using both software and hardware mutes. I was on a sales call years ago and activated the hardware mute. While one of our salespeople was talking I groaned out loud, and the call suddenly went silent. Somehow the hardware mute had failed, despite the light being lit.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

> 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. Another solution is to mute at the microphone, if your hardware has a button for that. This way the application can do whatever it wants, it will still get nothing. Using the hardware button is often less effort, than switching windows, finding that unmute button visually and moving the mouse to that button to click it. Or one could use push to talk. Since there are ways to mute yourself without having to do it in the app, it would be acceptable, if unmuting took a part of a second to be effective, indicating that by some "unmuting ..." label somewhere.

Veserv 5y ago

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 should take the word of a amoral entity that pinky swears they will not do so when a legally binding statement is so much cleaner and more straightforward.

lrem 5y ago
Would you use a service that sells your audio data when unmuted? :/

admax88qqq 5y ago

Not to mention the feature of notifying a user they are muted if it sounds like they're trying to talk.

Dig1t 5y ago

You are right that the problems you listed are easily solved by keeping the mic open/streaming. If you actually value privacy as a company though, these are all very solvable problems.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"if you really care about privacy, consider getting a hardware mute microphone" Even if you get an external microphone which can be muted, if you're on a laptop you'll still have an internal microphone which can't be muted except through software. What we really need are laptops sold without microphones and cameras. Then you can just use external ones only, and be sure that no one's listening/looking when you unplug them.

charcircuit 5y ago
Usually software only captures one mic at a time.
chaxor 5y ago
Unfortunately, even if a company offered this, in today's world the product would likely have a hidden microphone that isn't listed on the featured hardware. Much like the old physical typewriters had spyware hidden on them without the users knowledge. I would be willing to bet that every keyboard has something similar today. It's also striking to see how many people believe that they can trust the 'little indicator lights' on their microphone and cameras to actually indicate that their physically cut off from power. Very, very few devices are made in a way that this is true, and I would be hard pressed to believe it even if it was started in a manual unless I physically checked the equipment. Ultimately, just assume that the entire world can scrutinize everything that happens on or around any electronic device... so everything, all the time.
PeterStuer 5y ago
Technically any speaker can also potentially be used as a microphone.

neura 5y ago

It's simple. Most video conferencing apps that I've used will let you know that your mic is muted when you try to speak and your mic is muted. If you think they're doing something else, then don't use it. If you think you don't have a choice because your employer requires you to use it, your choice is not in whether or not to use the software. If it's something you care about, there's always a choice.

asxd 5y ago

I don't think an application has to actually do anything with the audio data in order to retain its access to the microphone. I'm not an expert here, but I'd imagine it's something like this: mic = grab_access_to_mic() while app_is_running: if (is_muted): pass else: send_that_audio(mic) It also mentions some of the apps sending the muted audio "to the cloud", which seems completely unrelated to retaining access to the mic. Also, seems like an honest mistake, but I think they got this backwards, right? > They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular videoconferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted. Wouldn't it be driver -> app -> cloud? I think I'm splitting hairs at this point though. Lastly, it would be nice if this article at least listed the apps that were investigated.

nanoservices 5y ago

Exactly the reason I use a headset with a boom mic. Flip it up to mute, and back down to activate. Love it.

sizzle 5y ago
wait till the wear and tear on that hinge breaks from doing this 50 times a day lol

zarzavat 5y ago

> I'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. They don't have to actually send the data though in this case they should just send 0 padding. It's all encrypted presumably, so the only externally observable factor is the packet size.

rob_c 5y ago

have to agree, it's not well explained, but hardly seems like a smoking gun that google/zoom/skype are listening out for anti-government hysteria...

hndamien 5y ago

It could also be for background noise suppression when unmuted. This isn't a giant privacy concern, just be clear about what the mute button actual does for all the privacy people. Generally, when I'm on a Zoom call, I'm not expecting ridiculously high privacy, and expect my recipient and the service to have access to the conversation. If not, I would use Session.

pishpash 5y ago

Or how about an OS-level software mute? Like you have for muting the speaker.

megous 5y ago

At the hardware level, it takes 0 time (10's of microseconds at most for I2C connected codecs, maybe a millisecond for USB 2.0 sound card) to mute the mic input channel to the mixer sitting before the A/D converter. If it takes any more than 0 time, it's caused by badly written software. I wouldn't blame the HW for the privacy issues, here.

ajsnigrutin 5y ago

Yep, plus on many apps, if you're speaking while muted, a popup/toaster will show, notifying you that you're muted and if you want to unmute.

andylynch 5y ago

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

Razengan 5y ago

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

ikiris 5y ago

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