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?
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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?
As I described in my example, the software needs to listen to your mic constantly in order to pop up the "you are muted" warning when you speak but you are on MUTE.
Nothing, short of a physical connection break, will guarantee that your mic isn't listening to anything. Anything that one program can do in the OS to mute your mic can be undone by another program.
And almost all laptops these days have built-in mics and cameras. You can put a piece of tape over the camera for privacy, but you can't put a piece of tape over the mic.
How paranoid do you want to live your life?
“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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Precisely the point. You can “mute” Zoom or Teams, but Cortana, Siri, or any other random app, browser add-in or malware are all still listening.