Microphone privacy concern
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Hello everyone,
I realized a privacy concern about microphone that concerned unsuspended whatsweb, and whatsnew, but that could possibly concern many other webapps, or even regular apps.
The concern is that when running those webapps with microphone permission allowed and unsuspended to get notifications, then the subjacent website (in that case whatsapp) can effectively spy on your microphone at any moment, while your phone is suspended and the screen turned off, without you even being notified about that.
I'm going to see what I can do, on the application side, but it's not easy as it seems chromium engine does not allow easily to switch on and off the microphone in the webview, whether we are using electron or on Qtwebengine. You can chose to give or not the permission for the microphone, but when it's given it's hard to revoke without reloading the whole application.
Here are some possible features that could be useful, on the side of the OS:
- Add an icon to the systray when an Application is recording the microphone as KDE does.
- Add an option to disable the microphone for all apps (except maybe the phone app) when the phone is suspended.
- Or Even add an option to automatically diable the microphone for apps that are not in foreground (maybe except if they have a background microphone authorization)
- Add some tools for the apps themself to be able to know wether or not they are recording, and enable/disable or mute/unmute the microphone for themself a the level of pulseaudio. This should be accessible even for a confined app, and through shell command so that is universal.
Any thought on that?
