Posted on 04/18/2022 11:12:55 AM PDT by ShadowAce
With many people working remotely, everybody should by now know how to behave when in a Zoom or Microsoft Teams meeting. Your camera picks up every move even when you think no one is watching, and your microphone can catch the faintest of sounds.
Most people assume that muting their computer’s microphone gives them total privacy. That should be the case, but it’s not.
Read on to find out how your microphone is sneakily still listening to everything you say.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that your device’s microphone continues to listen even after hitting the mute switch.
While the researchers didn’t name the specific applications that do this, they strongly hint that it is most video and conference call apps. In a blog post, the study claims that all the apps they tested “occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated.”
If that’s not bad enough, the audio then transmits to the servers of the hosting platform. The team explains further that in at least one instance, an app was “delivering data to its server at the same rate regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.”
It also doesn’t matter whether you use a built-in microphone or an external one, as it’s the platform’s software that dictates how the microphone works. The research team plans to present its findings to a panel at July’s Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.
The best way to ensure you’re actually muted when on a video chat is to mute the chat program and the microphone you’re using. If it’s an external microphone, unplug it. If you’re using earbuds, you can mute the microphone on them. The combination of a muted chat program and microphone should work.
The technique is called “double muting,” where you mute yourself in the application and on your device.
To mute your microphone through settings on a Windows computer:
Just remember to enable it again before speaking. You can also right-click on the microphone icon in the taskbar, click on Open Volume Mixer and mute the microphone.
On an Apple Mac:
How to disable your computer’s webcam and microphone
Protect your webcam and microphone
Try THIS trick!......................
LOL!
I like the way you solve all the individual, simple to complex problems, in windows:
“My computer listens when muted”
“switch to Linux”
“I got the blue screen of death”
“switch to Linux”
“My app is running slow”
“switch to Linux”
“I have a funny smell coming from my keyboard”
“switch to Linux”
“My butt itches”
“switch to Linux”
It is great that all I have to do to help gramma with her computer problems can be summed up that way, and then she can do all kinds of neat things like:
mkdir -p movies/2004/
cp -r dir_to_copy/ new_copy_dir/
rm file_to_copy.txt
chmod +x script
sudo apt install gimp
Works across all models, platforms and Operating Systems...............
People should assume, at all times, that anything on an Apple, Microsoft, Google device offers ZERO privacy.
Bump for reference.
This is not an OS issue.
LOL Don’t temp me :)
But the solution is?
or grandma can just click on software manager, and look for gimp and click a button and install it
bkmk
Read the article. It should take about 1.5 minutes.
I don't use video/call apps. I have microphone muted via the button on the laptop as well as in settings.
While the researchers didn’t name the specific applications that do this, they strongly hint that it is most video and conference call apps. In a blog post, the study claims that all the apps they tested “occasionally gather raw audio data while mute is activated.”
It took a real Einstein to figure this one out. Mute your mic while in a Teams or Zoom meeting, then say something. On your screen the words "Your Mic Is Muted" appear. Gee, if the mic isn't listening to you while the mic is muted, how did the program know you were speaking?
The "mute" while in a video call is only muting audio going to the other participants. It isn't muting the audio going to your own computer.
Is the answer “swith to linux”???
:)
I am just giving you a hard time, bud. I use both Linux and Windows every day.
Linux has been superior in every way EXCEPOT user interface.
Why someone has not come up with one that mimics windows I don’t understand.
It took a real Einstein to figure this one out. Mute your mic while in a Teams or Zoom meeting, then say something. On your screen the words “Your Mic Is Muted” appear. Gee, if the mic isn’t listening to you while the mic is muted, how did the program know you were speaking?
~~~
I don’t know this for a fact, but I would imagine it’s a lot easier for software developers to simply interrupt the digital audio feed in the software itself than to tell the OS to mute the device. In fact, it makes sense that the OS would not want to allow software to do this. What if you have other software that still need access to the hardware?
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