The Software Mute Button Is A Sham

According to the researchers, this data could be used to extract meaningful information. And, with a little machine learning, that information can paint an incredibly vivid picture of a user’s reality — again, even with your microphone muted in the app.

The research team was able to determi...

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 physi...

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 ...