
Ask HN: Chrome activating my microphone on OS X - aspyct
Hi all,<p>I have OverSight installed on my macbook (https:&#x2F;&#x2F;objective-see.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;oversight.html), which lets me see which apps activate the microphone.<p>Up until now, everything was quiet and expected.<p>As of today though, Chrome (Version 78.0.3904.70) tried on several occasions to activate the microphone. It crashed when I denied the request. I have not been on any website requiring microphone use and no website is allowed microphone access.<p>This seems to happen in particular when I reopen the lid of my macbook and it is taken out of sleep.<p>This is the log entry from OverSight:<p>2019-10-31 19:27:22 +0000: Audio Device became active (Built-in Microphone, process: Chrome Helper, &#x2F;Applications&#x2F;Google Chrome.app&#x2F;Contents&#x2F;Frameworks&#x2F;Google Chrome Framework.framework&#x2F;Versions&#x2F;78.0.3904.70&#x2F;Helpers&#x2F;Google Chrome Helper.app&#x2F;Contents&#x2F;MacOS&#x2F;Google Chrome Helper)<p>Any of you noticed a similar behavior?
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smt88
Chrome has become more and more intrusive for me, which makes sense because
its parent company has a financial incentive to intrude.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is intentional, surreptitious behavior.
Regardless, Firefox is excellent and Chromium is an OK fallback when you
(rarely) need it.

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marcos123
Brave browser

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throwaway-9320
It is based on Chromium so it isn't much different.

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joshmanders
It's very much different. Just like Chrome and Chromium are very much
different.

Just because it's built on Chromium which means Blink, V8, etc. Doesn't mean
that it brings all the baggage that Chrome does with Google's intrusive
nature.

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gtirloni
Do you have voice search enabled ("ok Google")?

I don't know if web workers allow microphone access but, in case you've
allowed a website to access your microphone recently, I'd check if it hasn't
installed anything automatically they could be triggering this.

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gtirloni
It doesn't look like webworkers can access the microphone since the
getUserMedia() function is not included in the API.

[https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-
US/docs/Web/API/Web_Workers_API/Functions_and_classes_available_to_workers)

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unlinked_dll
I'm away from a mac and too lazy to do this, but have you tried writing a
little program to poll the audio configuration? Device name, number of
channels, sample rate, etc.

It could be Chrome is just checking the device configuration for input/output
at the same time (it needs the latter for the audio APIs) and the service
might be pinging that as "microphone activity" when really they're just
checking the available devices and their settings.

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SiVal
This is why I want a hardware switch on my microphone, camera, and radio
(wifi, etc.) as a standard part of every product that includes them. No matter
what features, "bugs" ("oops, did we accidentally bug your house?"), policies,
etc., if the power switch says "no", no really means no.

~~~
Trias11
Old style duct tape over my cam works much better than Zoom conference
settings that, oops!, for some reasons always forgets that i want my camera
always OFF.

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capableweb
First feeling I get is that it's a extension that is doing it. Are you able to
always reproduce now when you open Chrome? Can you reproduce it when
uninstalling all extensions too? You can Chrome run with `--disable-
extensions` to just disable them for one run.

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srcmap
Anyone on know if there is a windows or linux tool to monitor app access to
Microphone?

~~~
capableweb
These two commands gives you a list of programs using the sound devices:

    
    
      fuser -v /dev/snd/* && lsof /dev/snd/*

