"You're Muted — Or Are You? Videoconferencing Apps May Listen Even When Mic Is Off"
Engineering professor Kassem Fawaz and graduate student Yucheng Yang at the University of Wisconsin-Madison conducted an analysis of the way in which popular videoconferencing apps collect data. They discovered that at least one of the apps collects all the audio from a user's microphone even while it is on mute. Fawaz's brother was on a videoconference with his microphone muted when he saw that the microphone light was still on, thus indicating his microphone was still being accessed. Fawaz and Yang investigated the extent of this "mic-off-light-on" phenomenon by trying out many different videoconferencing apps on major operating systems, including iOS, Android, Windows, and Mac. They wanted to see if each app still accessed the microphone when the user muted it. In most cases, when you mute yourself, these apps still do not give up microphone access, thus posing a threat to privacy. When muted, users do not expect the apps to collect data. After their initial testing, Fawaz and Yang, together with colleagues from Loyola University Chicago, formally investigated what happens when videoconferencing software microphones are muted. Their results will be presented at the Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium in July. According to the researchers, their findings raise privacy concerns. This article continues to discuss the privacy analysis of mute buttons in videoconferencing apps.