The pandemic has completely changed the methods of interaction; sanitizers went from being complementary to essential. Meetings and lectures went from being physical to virtual on Zoom. The video-conferencing app, Zoom has now become a part of our new normal.
Apple’s audience is facing trouble using the famous video-conferencing app. According to the reports; Zoom seems to keep its microphone ‘ON’ even after the users have it running in the background. The issue arose when users suspected thanks to Apple’s new operating system macOS Monterey (Also called MacOS 12) visual cue that is located on the menu. The cue changes color to green when an application is using the system’s camera or orange when the application has access to the system’s microphone. macOS users reported that the orange alert kept on appearing whether they were on a zoom call or not. Users took the issue to Zoom’s support page while some like developer Felix Krause who tweeted regarding the issue.
Zoom soon released an update later on in December to fix the problem; according to them the new update Version 5.9.1 resolves the bug with the orange dot detection which was being triggered even when a user is not on a call. However, many others still kept on reporting that they were still seeing the alerts despite the update.
Since the number of people working from home is increasing in 2022 because of new evolving variants of COVID-19. According to Zoom’s spokesperson, users tend to leave zoom open in the background after attending their zoom call. Since the bug is still pretty much active even in the latest version, it is advised that users should only open zoom when they are about to attend a zoom call and make sure they close zoom in the background too when they are done with the call until the issue is completely fixed.
It seems that the bug is only a troublemaker for the new macOSMonterey users since some users tried experimenting using third-party webcams on Mac Mini but failed to detect anything. It seems that it’s better to take precautions using webcams that have built-in privacy covers for now.
This is not the first time that Zoom was accused of violating privacy, like back in mid-2021 when zoom had to settle for a lawsuit for eighty-five million U.S. dollars when privacy policies were the heat of discussion midst the pandemic. There are more ways to boost your privacy in zoom without too much trouble.
Apple’s audience is facing trouble using the famous video-conferencing app. According to the reports; Zoom seems to keep its microphone ‘ON’ even after the users have it running in the background. The issue arose when users suspected thanks to Apple’s new operating system macOS Monterey (Also called MacOS 12) visual cue that is located on the menu. The cue changes color to green when an application is using the system’s camera or orange when the application has access to the system’s microphone. macOS users reported that the orange alert kept on appearing whether they were on a zoom call or not. Users took the issue to Zoom’s support page while some like developer Felix Krause who tweeted regarding the issue.
Zoom soon released an update later on in December to fix the problem; according to them the new update Version 5.9.1 resolves the bug with the orange dot detection which was being triggered even when a user is not on a call. However, many others still kept on reporting that they were still seeing the alerts despite the update.
Since the number of people working from home is increasing in 2022 because of new evolving variants of COVID-19. According to Zoom’s spokesperson, users tend to leave zoom open in the background after attending their zoom call. Since the bug is still pretty much active even in the latest version, it is advised that users should only open zoom when they are about to attend a zoom call and make sure they close zoom in the background too when they are done with the call until the issue is completely fixed.
It seems that the bug is only a troublemaker for the new macOSMonterey users since some users tried experimenting using third-party webcams on Mac Mini but failed to detect anything. It seems that it’s better to take precautions using webcams that have built-in privacy covers for now.
This is not the first time that Zoom was accused of violating privacy, like back in mid-2021 when zoom had to settle for a lawsuit for eighty-five million U.S. dollars when privacy policies were the heat of discussion midst the pandemic. There are more ways to boost your privacy in zoom without too much trouble.
Update, Statement from a Zoom spokesperson: The Zoom client for macOS 5.9.3, released on January 25, 2022, fixed a bug involving the failure to properly terminate the microphone use post-meeting. Zoom has determined that this bug did not result in audio data being transmitted back to Zoom's platform. As always, we recommend users make sure their Zoom client is updated to the latest version.
