Muting your mic reportedly doesn’t stop big tech from recording your audio

Grad students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison were able to build machine learning models capable of determining what a teleconference app user was doing while their microphone was muted with greater than 80% accuracy.

Our real concern is that big tech either doesn’t care whether users know they’re being recorded even when they’re muted, or it never stopped to think users would care. Either way, it shows a disturbing level of detachment from the user experience.

Big tech’s unspoken mantra is “data at all costs,” and this just goes to prove how thirsty the beast is. There’s no good reason not to explicitly inform users in large print that the mute button doesn’t stop their audio feed to the server.

If you truly want to mute your audio feed, you need to perform a double mute. If you’re fortunate enough to own a headset that has a physical mute button on it, use that to mute your headset and then use the button in the app as an extra layer of muting.

If your headset doesn’t have a physical mute button, or you’re using an onboard microphone to communicate, you’ll need to do a system mute by muting your microphone from the system settings in your operating system, as well as muting in the app.

Forcing users to go into operating system menus in order to ensure they’re achieving a modicum of privacy is an anti-user policy. And, furthermore, it demonstrates how much more sensitive our audio data can be than our video data.

Don’t forget to double mute! You’ll probably forget to double unmute from time to time, but the trade-off is keeping Google, Microsoft, and all the others from training their machines on the ambient sounds of your private life.