Imagine a world where your privacy is constantly under threat, even when you think you're safe. Muting your microphone might not be the foolproof solution you believe it to be. Big tech companies could still be recording your audio, raising serious privacy concerns.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison investigated “many popular apps” to determine the extent that video conferencing apps capture data while users employ the in-software’mute’ button.
They found that all of the apps they tested occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated, with one app gathering information and delivering data at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted.
Lead author on the study Kassem Fawaz said in the university press release:
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. I don’t think that exists for microphones.
Using network traffic that we intercept en route to the telemetry server, we implement a proof-of-concept background activity classifier and demonstrate the feasibility of inferring the ongoing background activity during a meeting – cooking, cleaning, etc.
We achieved 81.9% macro accuracy on identifying six common background activities using intercepted outgoing telemetry packets when a user is muted.
At the end of the day, it’s unclear exactly what big tech’s doing with this data.
Regardless, the fact that it’s being collected under such misleading circumstances is cause for major concern
- Forcing users to go into operating system menus in order to ensure they’re achieving a modicum of privacy is an anti-user policy
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