Privacy

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Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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EasyEffects can change mic input live. Privacy option for people who need to use their voice in any public/insecure online setting & don't want to be easily identified. (github.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

12 comments fedilink hide all child comments

There are other FOSS real-time voice changers for Linux, but the others I found either seemed to have fewer features, be less polished, or be abandoned.

I'm not really a voice expert or anything so I'm not sure what aspects of voice a, like, forensic voice analyst or something would look at. I've just changed the pitch and I sound different enough that I wouldn't recognise the voice, which is good enough for me. Open to suggestions as to what effects would give the most privacy in terms of making it harder to identify your voice (while still being intelligible)

Also, for people's reference, if you want mic input to be changed for all apps, go to three dots > Preferences > General > Audio > Process All Input Streams and enable.

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[–] [email protected] 34 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

I tried it last year, but didn't find any presets that were effective and practical for voice disguising, and didn't have time to learn how to wrangle the low-level effects to do the same.

(To be clear, pitch shifting is trivial to reverse, so not what I would consider effective or practical for this purpose.)

It was easy to set up, though, and appeared to be better maintained than some of the alternatives. I might give it another try eventually. Perhaps some commercial audio plugins would help.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Yeah that's fair. And my pitch-shifting is not for a particularly well-resourced/dedicated threat model, literally just "would I recognise this as my voice if I heard it"—obviously insufficient if your adversary is going to put effort into identifying your voice.

I'm a bit surprised that no one has made a good preset for voice disguising. I might just keep layering effects for further obfuscation.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Voice disguising is one thing AI can actually be useful for. Replacing the voice altogether with a modeled one will be a better disguise than applying well known audio effects. Then you just have to make sure your vocabulary and phrasing don't give you away.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I personally don't need sophistication, I just want to not sound like a woman in a game voice chat. I wonder if this is what I need.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

I hope the day will come soon when there's no longer a reason to avoid sounding like a woman in game chat. Hearing only male voices gets old fast.