9 ms·

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 a

by 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.
    - feanaro 5y ago
      The API is called Insertable Streams. It's not actually supposed to be Chrome-specific, others are just lagging in implementing it. Element has native E2EE for 1-to-1 calls, but uses Jitsi for group calls. Native E2EE group calls actually also exist, called Element Call (https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/ https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-...) but they're yet to be integrated into Element and specced into Matrix, I believe.
      - BlueTemplar 5y ago
        Jitsi's own solution I assume (also on Jitsi Meet), and not the usual XMPP/Jabber that (non-Meet) Jitsi uses ?
  - hunter2_ 5y ago
    > 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-silent moments therein) is lightweight enough for reasonably sized groups. Obviously this same n^2 scaling issue happens with the video anyway which is never mixed.
    - pthatcherg 5y ago
      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/ https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/
      - hunter2_ 5y ago
        Good stuff, thanks!
UncleMeat 5y ago
If your VC software decides to perform signal processing on the microphone input while it is running but you are muted then yes, it can determine things about your behavior. But that's true for literally all applications running on your computer. Evil software running on your machine can do all sorts of bad things.
- Tepix 5y ago
  You can tell that an application accesses the microphone these days.
  - necovek 5y ago
    It's not that simple. An application could have access to the microphone, but an OS could be providing the mute functionality, thereby not passing any data to the app even if it keeps access to it (there are hardware/software issues with releasing and reaccessing it with extremely low latency like one expects of a mute/unmute button). The problem, as reported in the article, is that apps are not making use of the OS mute, but are instead still reading from the microphone, and some are even passing the readout to their servers.
  - Gigachad 5y ago
    On Macos, there is an indicator dot in the status bar, on all chat apps, the mic dot is always active while the camera dot does turn off when the camera is disabled. The most likely situation is that turning the mic and camera on at the OS level has delay which is acceptable for turning on video but not for audio where you want to be able to respond to something quickly.
- trelane 5y ago
  > But that's true for literally all applications running on your computer. Evil software running on your machine can do all sorts of bad things. This is why I personally insist on using the web version of streaming software over an installed binary.
- scurraorbis 5y ago
  If software that actually exists is really already sending "telemetry" that can reliably identify your activities in the real world the concern isn't that theoretical anymore.
nemothekid 5y ago
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 experience even if it has security/privacy implications.
- ortusdux 5y ago
  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.
  - chefandy 5y ago
    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.
  - julienb_sea 5y ago
    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.
    - joshuaissac 5y ago
      > Audited data privacy is a core selling point of enterprise communication systems like Slack and Zoom Is Zoom audited? Zoom had been lying for about having end-to-end encryption, for example, until they were caught by the US Federal Trade Commission. Surely, something like that would have been discovered earlier in an audit, if they were audited and the audits were worth something. They were also sending data to third parties like Facebook and Google through their SDKs. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-users-about-end-to-end-encryption-for-years-ftc-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-use... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-for-lying-about-encryption-and-sending-data-to-facebook-and-google/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...
phendrenad2 5y ago
Why did you move the goalpost? The comment you're responding to claims that there isn't a malicious purpose here. You instead claim to rebut it by saying that it's "concerning for those concerned with privacy". Can you see how those are different things?
quantified 5y ago
It is, just most people don’t care. And you can’t buy a little shutter for your laptop mic like you can for the camera.
- necovek 5y ago
  You can control your microphone in your OS settings. While we are still on PulseAudio, check out pavucontrol for Linux systems. I am sure there are equivalent tools for Windows or MacOS. There are also laptops with hardware microphone switches (eg. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ or https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/).
- izacus 5y ago
  You can easily buy a microphone with a physical mute switch though.
  - quantified 5y ago
    Yes, more addons for the employer-supplied Mac. I miss my Thinkpads
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
> 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 latency every time you unmute. I want my mute button to work ASAP and I don't believe Zoom (or anyone else) is interested in whether or not I'm eating while muted.
- marricks 5y ago
  > Because they're not actually doing that? >> Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending Are you sure they’re not? The used these algorithms on telemetry packets sent from browsers. I see no reason to give companies whose revenue is built on ads the benefit of the doubt here.
  - asojfdowgh 5y ago
    I don't think one should go to the level of making random bs claims about things, and then blaming the groups one is making the claims about.
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    Are you sure they are? That seems to be the bar we should meet when you make an accusation, right? Besides - is it really super valuable to know that while I (thought I) was muted that I was cooking? Zoom's going to find out I... eat?
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > 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.
- worik 5y ago
  > ....and I don't believe Zoom (or anyone else) is interested in whether or not I'm eating while muted. But the detectives with a search warrant are pleased to be able to listen to your private conversations. The secret police who do not need a warrant (or legality) are glad to be able to listen too. The staff at Zoom are happy to spy on you, probably, for a small reward. A proper mute removes those concerns. A mute that does not mute is inviting a lawsuit
victimblamer 5y ago
> 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.
- scurraorbis 5y ago
Aunche 5y ago
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?
ghostpepper 5y ago
"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." The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted. I'm not sure why they don't say which one, and I'm not sure what is meant by "occasionally gather raw audio data" 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. The real story here should be that one app where the mute button doesn't actually work. The others are all operating normally as far as I can tell.
- 2fast4you 5y ago
  "occasionally gather raw audio data" could be used to remind you that you're muted when you're trying to talk. I've seen that in either GoToMeeting or Zoom
- e40 5y ago
  > 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.
  - toyg 5y ago
    > 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.
    - sushisource 5y ago
      Precisely, this is why I think the earlier comment's suggestion: > 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? Sounds nice on the surface, but is ultimately silly. Sure, it'd be nice if everyone did the right thing, but you can never guarantee that, and hence if you really care you need to perform the mute at a lower level than what the app has access to.
Manuel_D 5y ago
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.
rob_c 5y ago
please go away and read about the architectural permissions for things like this, performance, latency and re-read this... if it bugs you throw away your smartphone or custom-compile lineageOS
tomxor 5y ago
> 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 You're implying government policy for how companies operate in this area... Which is worth pursuing, but we all know that usually ends up half way effective, requires a cat and mouse game of auditing and enforcement, or big companies playing fight club math with the fines. Even if this was already the case for this particular issue, as users we end up never really being sure if a company is violating that particular requirement. > users have to take steps like a hardware-muted mic (which isn't always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy? This should be the default, just like how operating systems and networking evolved over the past 30 years starting with a "trusts everyone" attitude towards a "trust no one" by default. We need to assume most companies are potential bad actors, the hardware and software that comprises the basic operation of our device needs to provide the user with facilities to control flow of information separate from third parties, especially when it comes to input devices. In the case of microphones and cameras hardware switches should be the norm, or at minimum indicator lights. This could also quite easily be a government policy for hardware vendors, and I suspect it would be more effective... It only has to reach a threshold after which users expectations shift to force manufacturers hands, so it's direct effect need not be as comprehensive to be effective.
scurraorbis 5y ago
It's amazing how many people down thread simply ignore or minimize what you point out here. And this on the same site where people get mad about the wrong kind of cookie which they always had full control over anyways ...
bearbearbear 5y ago

by Sakos 5y ago

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.
  - feanaro 5y ago
    The API is called Insertable Streams. It's not actually supposed to be Chrome-specific, others are just lagging in implementing it. Element has native E2EE for 1-to-1 calls, but uses Jitsi for group calls. Native E2EE group calls actually also exist, called Element Call (https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-element-call/ https://element.io/blog/introducing-native-matrix-voip-with-...) but they're yet to be integrated into Element and specced into Matrix, I believe.
    - BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Jitsi's own solution I assume (also on Jitsi Meet), and not the usual XMPP/Jabber that (non-Meet) Jitsi uses ?
- hunter2_ 5y ago
  > 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-silent moments therein) is lightweight enough for reasonably sized groups. Obviously this same n^2 scaling issue happens with the video anyway which is never mixed.
  - pthatcherg 5y ago
    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/ https://signal.org/blog/how-to-build-encrypted-group-calls/
    - hunter2_ 5y ago
      Good stuff, thanks!

UncleMeat 5y ago

If your VC software decides to perform signal processing on the microphone input while it is running but you are muted then yes, it can determine things about your behavior. But that's true for literally all applications running on your computer. Evil software running on your machine can do all sorts of bad things.

Tepix 5y ago
You can tell that an application accesses the microphone these days.
- necovek 5y ago
  It's not that simple. An application could have access to the microphone, but an OS could be providing the mute functionality, thereby not passing any data to the app even if it keeps access to it (there are hardware/software issues with releasing and reaccessing it with extremely low latency like one expects of a mute/unmute button). The problem, as reported in the article, is that apps are not making use of the OS mute, but are instead still reading from the microphone, and some are even passing the readout to their servers.
- Gigachad 5y ago
  On Macos, there is an indicator dot in the status bar, on all chat apps, the mic dot is always active while the camera dot does turn off when the camera is disabled. The most likely situation is that turning the mic and camera on at the OS level has delay which is acceptable for turning on video but not for audio where you want to be able to respond to something quickly.
trelane 5y ago
> But that's true for literally all applications running on your computer. Evil software running on your machine can do all sorts of bad things. This is why I personally insist on using the web version of streaming software over an installed binary.
scurraorbis 5y ago
If software that actually exists is really already sending "telemetry" that can reliably identify your activities in the real world the concern isn't that theoretical anymore.

nemothekid 5y ago

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 experience even if it has security/privacy implications.

ortusdux 5y ago
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.
- chefandy 5y ago
  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.
- julienb_sea 5y ago
  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.
  - joshuaissac 5y ago
    > Audited data privacy is a core selling point of enterprise communication systems like Slack and Zoom Is Zoom audited? Zoom had been lying for about having end-to-end encryption, for example, until they were caught by the US Federal Trade Commission. Surely, something like that would have been discovered earlier in an audit, if they were audited and the audits were worth something. They were also sending data to third parties like Facebook and Google through their SDKs. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-users-about-end-to-end-encryption-for-years-ftc-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2020/11/zoom-lied-to-use... https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-for-lying-about-encryption-and-sending-data-to-facebook-and-google/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/08/zoom-to-pay-85m-...

phendrenad2 5y ago

Why did you move the goalpost? The comment you're responding to claims that there isn't a malicious purpose here. You instead claim to rebut it by saying that it's "concerning for those concerned with privacy". Can you see how those are different things?

quantified 5y ago

It is, just most people don’t care. And you can’t buy a little shutter for your laptop mic like you can for the camera.

necovek 5y ago
You can control your microphone in your OS settings. While we are still on PulseAudio, check out pavucontrol for Linux systems. I am sure there are equivalent tools for Windows or MacOS. There are also laptops with hardware microphone switches (eg. https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/ or https://frame.work/ https://frame.work/).
izacus 5y ago
You can easily buy a microphone with a physical mute switch though.
- quantified 5y ago
  Yes, more addons for the employer-supplied Mac. I miss my Thinkpads

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

> 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 latency every time you unmute. I want my mute button to work ASAP and I don't believe Zoom (or anyone else) is interested in whether or not I'm eating while muted.

marricks 5y ago
> Because they're not actually doing that? >> Applying the classifier to the type of telemetry packets the app was sending Are you sure they’re not? The used these algorithms on telemetry packets sent from browsers. I see no reason to give companies whose revenue is built on ads the benefit of the doubt here.
- asojfdowgh 5y ago
  I don't think one should go to the level of making random bs claims about things, and then blaming the groups one is making the claims about.
- madeofpalk 5y ago
  Are you sure they are? That seems to be the bar we should meet when you make an accusation, right? Besides - is it really super valuable to know that while I (thought I) was muted that I was cooking? Zoom's going to find out I... eat?
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> 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.
worik 5y ago
> ....and I don't believe Zoom (or anyone else) is interested in whether or not I'm eating while muted. But the detectives with a search warrant are pleased to be able to listen to your private conversations. The secret police who do not need a warrant (or legality) are glad to be able to listen too. The staff at Zoom are happy to spy on you, probably, for a small reward. A proper mute removes those concerns. A mute that does not mute is inviting a lawsuit

victimblamer 5y ago

> 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.

scurraorbis 5y ago

Aunche 5y ago

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?

ghostpepper 5y ago

"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." The way I read that is, only one of the apps actually sends audio data to the server when the mic is muted. I'm not sure why they don't say which one, and I'm not sure what is meant by "occasionally gather raw audio data" 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. The real story here should be that one app where the mute button doesn't actually work. The others are all operating normally as far as I can tell.

2fast4you 5y ago
"occasionally gather raw audio data" could be used to remind you that you're muted when you're trying to talk. I've seen that in either GoToMeeting or Zoom
e40 5y ago
> 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.
- toyg 5y ago
  > 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.
  - sushisource 5y ago
    Precisely, this is why I think the earlier comment's suggestion: > 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? Sounds nice on the surface, but is ultimately silly. Sure, it'd be nice if everyone did the right thing, but you can never guarantee that, and hence if you really care you need to perform the mute at a lower level than what the app has access to.

Manuel_D 5y ago

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.

rob_c 5y ago

please go away and read about the architectural permissions for things like this, performance, latency and re-read this... if it bugs you throw away your smartphone or custom-compile lineageOS

tomxor 5y ago

> 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 You're implying government policy for how companies operate in this area... Which is worth pursuing, but we all know that usually ends up half way effective, requires a cat and mouse game of auditing and enforcement, or big companies playing fight club math with the fines. Even if this was already the case for this particular issue, as users we end up never really being sure if a company is violating that particular requirement. > users have to take steps like a hardware-muted mic (which isn't always an option) to ensure a basic expectation of privacy? This should be the default, just like how operating systems and networking evolved over the past 30 years starting with a "trusts everyone" attitude towards a "trust no one" by default. We need to assume most companies are potential bad actors, the hardware and software that comprises the basic operation of our device needs to provide the user with facilities to control flow of information separate from third parties, especially when it comes to input devices. In the case of microphones and cameras hardware switches should be the norm, or at minimum indicator lights. This could also quite easily be a government policy for hardware vendors, and I suspect it would be more effective... It only has to reach a threshold after which users expectations shift to force manufacturers hands, so it's direct effect need not be as comprehensive to be effective.

scurraorbis 5y ago

It's amazing how many people down thread simply ignore or minimize what you point out here. And this on the same site where people get mad about the wrong kind of cookie which they always had full control over anyways ...

bearbearbear 5y ago