Big Brother may be listening, even when you think you've blocked him

 

It seems that muting your microphone when on a video call . . . doesn't.

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.

According to a university press release, their findings were substantial:

They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular video conferencing applications as the audio traveled from the app to the computer audio driver and then to the network while the app was muted.

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.

. . .

In other words: grad students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were able to build machine learning models capable of determining what a teleconference app user was doing while their microphone was muted with greater than 80% accuracy.

File under: Imagine what Google or Microsoft could do with their massive AI models. Yikes!

There's more at the link, including ways to "double-mute" your microphone to overcome such snooping.

I'd love to know how many companies are using such software to "listen in" to what their work-from-home employees are really doing.  I'm willing to bet it won't be a small proportion.  This is yet another way in which our privacy is being degraded and ignored.

Peter