Computer programs have become an integral part of our lives and are hard to imagine without laptops, tablets and smartphones. It turned out that they could threaten our privacy.

Many people use apps for remote work and online study. However, they may not be safe. Experts have analyzed more than 200 programs and identified risks in popular video conferencing applications.

Google Meet, Zoom, MS Teams / Skype, Slack, BlueJeans, Cisco Webex, GoToMeeting, WhereBy, Discord, Jitsi Meet and many other apps have proven that they can listen to our conversations.

American researcher Casim Fawaz attended a video conference, after which he turned off his microphone. The scientist noticed that the red light started flashing again and the microphone continued to work.

Between experiments, the situation became clearer. Even when the microphone is turned off, more than 200 applications continue to “hear” everything around us. Programs can collect the received data and transfer it to different servers.

Experts have come up with two solutions to the problem. Users need to disable the microphone in the device settings itself, which can take a long time. You can find professionals who create a program to mute the microphone when needed.

It was already known that the occupiers were listening to the telephone conversations of the Ukrainians. The National Security and Defense Council advised on how to avoid this.