Your laptop microphone is ‘spying on you’ when on mute, shock study claims

YOU may think you’ve muted yourself during a work call but a new study suggests your microphone will still be listening.

According to a shocking report, all your audio data is being recorded and sent to the company hosting your call even if you’re on mute.

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Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison claim to have investigated “many popular apps” used for video chats and conference calls.

They haven’t yet revealed the names of the video chat apps specifically.

The study said that every time you one of the video conference apps, you’re sending audio data to the company that owns the service.

It claims this includes all your audio data, even background noise or chats you’re having when you’ve muted your mic on the call.

Assistant professor Kassem Fawaz said: “It turns out, in the vast majority of cases, when you mute yourself, these apps do not give up access to the microphone.

“And that’s a problem. When you’re muted, people don’t expect these apps to collect data.”

A University of Wisconsin-Madison press release explains: “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.”

The study hasn’t officially been published yet but it has been added to the 2022 Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium.

Researchers used it to warn that important data could be taken from audio recordings, suggesting people should be careful what they say even when on mute.

The team conducted their own test to see what they could learn from audio collected while a microphone was on mute.

It revealed: “We achieved 81.9% macro accuracy on identifying six common background activities using intercepted outgoing telemetry packets when a user is muted.”

How to double mute

If the study has you concerned, you may want to try double muting your microphone.

According to The Next Web, you can do this by muting yourself within the app and on your headphones.

If you’re not using headphones or they don’t have a mute button, mute your laptop microphone in its settings while also muting yourself in the video chat.