Watch out, your muted microphone is just listening in
Yes, it really is. Your muted microphone is listening, even if you don’t think so.
During the corona pandemic, video calling has become popular in a short time. We had to. Now that the pandemic has eased, we still use video calling a lot. But every time you use a video conferencing app, you’re sending your audio data to the company hosting the service.
Muted microphone listens in
This includes all your audio data, according to a new study. This includes speech and background noise whether you’re broadcasting or not. Researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison examined “many popular apps” to determine the extent to which video conferencing apps capture data. This while users use the in-software ‘mute’ button.
According to a university press release, their findings were significant. They used runtime binary analysis tools to trace raw audio in popular video conferencing applications. While the app’s audio went to the computer audio driver and then to the network, the app was muted.
Discoveries
The researchers found that all the apps they tested occasionally collect raw audio data while mute is activated. With one popular app even collecting information and delivering data to its server at the same speed regardless of whether the microphone is muted or not.
Unfortunately, as this research has not been published, we cannot confirm the specific apps tested. So be careful what you say, even if your microphone is muted. You never know! Nevertheless, we take the research seriously, due to the fact that it has been accepted for the 2022 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium. We’ll just have to wait and see who gets the name when the research is published in June. However, we should not draw firm conclusions. It may just be that it makes sense to store the information.
