“The walls have ears,” may sound like the ravings of paranoia, but even if the walls don’t, your laptop and phone certainly do. New research from the University of Wisconsin suggests that those omnipresent microphones we invite into our homes are harder to silence than you think. Kassem Fawaz, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, and graduate student Yucheng Yang recently took a look at the “mute microphone” feature of popular videoconferencing apps, such as Zoom and Face Time. They found that the software doesn’t work quite the way you might expect.
Did you enjoy this story? Your funding makes great, local journalism like this possible. Donate here
