Muting your mic reportedly doesn’t stop big tech from recording your audio - https://thenextweb.com/news/muting-your-mic-doesnt-stop-big-tech-recording-your-audio
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.
@twitnews I usually find it easier to mute my mic in Plasma than any voice app so I usually just do that.
@twitnews .hg And this is why we need hardware killswitches.
If your box doesn't have them, Qubes is the next best thing.
@twitnews wha.
How the fuck does that even work??
@twitnews Or d'you mean muting from within the app, but not from the OS?
@twitnews
They looked at Zoom, Slack, MS Teams/Skype, Google Meet, Cisco Webex, BlueJeans, WhereBy, GoToMeeting, Jitsi Meet, Discord
"All VCAs [video conferencing apps] actively query the microphone when the user is muted, and they might have legitimate purposes. For example, Zoom alerts the user when they try to speak with their microphone muted. The privacy policies of these services need to be explicit about microphone access, which is not currently the case."
https://wiscprivacy.com/papers/vca_mute.pdf