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I'm looking for an option to deny a user the ability disable microphone on a laptop running Windows 7.

I've tried to set DENY permission on the microphone setting in the registry, but it doesn't work.

TRiG
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Widmo
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    I think I've found [your other account](http://serverfault.com/users/176591/thensa) – MDMarra Jan 27 '14 at 13:13
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    Even if I knew off the top of my head, I'd refuse to answer this on moral grounds. Please explain more about what you're trying to achieve. – Dan Jan 27 '14 at 13:16
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    Yeah, I was considering asking him why he wanted to do this. The lack of detail as to why combined with the emoticon doesn't really engender confidence. – Katherine Villyard Jan 27 '14 at 13:28
  • Our company do researches, we employ lot of surveyor, our program record surveys made with respondents. Our employees know, they are recording and tries to cheat us, doing every 10th survey fake, disabling microphone, and says its defect. All activities is LEGAL. – Widmo Jan 27 '14 at 13:57
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    @Widmo This is a political problem, not a technical one. If your employees are that hell bent on fiddling the system, they'll put time and energy into breaking whatever restrictions you put in place. Why not just make it that every survey must have the audio associated with it to be valid? – Dan Jan 27 '14 at 14:08
  • @Dan, cause of software is developed, deployed over 1000 computers in whole country, this is only one reasonable workaround. – Widmo Jan 27 '14 at 14:38
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    @Widmo You know they'll be able to plug in a blank 3.5mm connector (or some headphones) into the microphone port, which will disable the on-board microphone at an electronic level don't you? – Dan Jan 27 '14 at 14:42
  • The point is that its not reasonable. If people are determined to interfere with this process they will. If this is a problem with the people doing these surveys then it needs to be fixed as a personnel issue, not a technical one. – Rob Moir Jan 27 '14 at 14:44
  • Why this discussion switch to: why I want to do it, not hos to do it? Even jack putted on socket, voice is still recorded from laptop mic. – Widmo Jan 27 '14 at 15:02
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    If **all** contractors are doing this, it may well be a bug. If only **some** contractors are doing this, fire those ones and get new ones. – ceejayoz Jan 27 '14 at 17:14

1 Answers1

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Can I deny a user the ability to disable the microphone in Windows 7?

No, you cannot. (Nor can you do it in any other OS.) You would need custom hardware where the microphone is hardened against interference or tampering, and isolated from interaction with a user to even begin to address this. And even that wouldn't solve your problem.

There's no way to protect the microphone from someone who has physical access to the machine. They can plug speakers into the microphone jack, interfere with the electrical signal (like by placing a cell phone on top of the mic), muffle the sound by smushing a pillow up against it, give you fake audio data by playing a recording of static on a handheld tape recorder, and God only knows what else. There is simply no way to solve this problem from a technical angle - even with custom, hardened hardware, a pillow or a recording of static (or garbled, staticy-speech) would render all that hardware useless.

This is a personnel problem. Fix it at that level - it sounds like you guys need to hire better people... or at least, people less inclined to rip you off. As suggested in the comments, having the policy changed so that surveys without proper audio data are considered invalid is probably your easiest and cheapest option. If not, submitting faked surveys is [probably] a criminal offense (fraud would be the applicable statute in most places), and assuming these are corporate laptops, you can use monitoring and logging software to catch the lazier offenders. If not, well, you can do your detective work the old fashioned-way... or maybe just accept that people cheating you is part of life.

Whatever you decide on, preventing users from disabling the microphones through the operating system will solve exactly nothing, so you need to decide on a different approach to this problem.

HopelessN00b
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