mike@, the "communications" name is provided by the OS during
enumeration. Can you check using e.g. [1] the listed name? 

E.g. I see in my laptop:

./cam_formats_avf_64b 
2016-08-29 08:01:11.653 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694]  I see 2 devices.
2016-08-29 08:01:11.654 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] -------------------- Built-in Microphone --------------- AppleHDAEngineInput:1B,0,1,0:1 --- bltn
2016-08-29 08:01:11.654 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] Capture format: <AVCaptureDeviceFormat: 0x7fe7c2c02740> 'soun'/'lpcm' SR=96000,FF=4,BPP=8,FPP=1,BPF=8,CH=2,BPC=24 
2016-08-29 08:01:11.654 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] Capture format: <AVCaptureDeviceFormat: 0x7fe7c2c029a0> 'soun'/'lpcm' SR=88200,FF=4,BPP=8,FPP=1,BPF=8,CH=2,BPC=24 
[...]
2016-08-29 08:01:11.655 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] Capture format: <AVCaptureDeviceFormat: 0x7fe7c2c031c0> 'soun'/'lpcm' SR=44100,FF=9,BPP=8,FPP=1,BPF=8,CH=2,BPC=32 
2016-08-29 08:01:11.655 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] -------------------- FaceTime HD Camera --------------- DJH5266R8QBG1HPBV --- pci 
2016-08-29 08:01:11.656 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] Capture format: <AVCaptureDeviceFormat: 0x7fe7c2e0cb80> 'vide'/'yuvs' enc dims = 1280x720, pres dims = 1280x720 { 1.00-30.00 fps } 
[...]
2016-08-29 08:01:11.656 cam_formats_avf_64b[30265:4478694] Capture format: <AVCaptureDeviceFormat: 0x7fe7c2e13190> 'vide'/'420v' enc dims = 320x240, pres dims = 320x240 { 1.00-30.00 fps } 


where the enumerated name is shown in between the dashes.

This name is also propagated to e.g. chrome://media-internals/, 
"Video Capture" tab and, "Device Name" column.


[1] https://github.com/miguelao/cam_formats

I will try and get this. I know it is listed as that but I think the issue is still that "hash" id you guys generate. It should not be the word "communications" right?

this is definitely windows only, so you can remove the mac tag

Oh, I thought it was Mac bc of the User Agent ("Macintosh; 
Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3"), corrected.

Reading #4 --> perhaps guidou@ can comment, since he added
"salt" (an maybe "pepper" ;P ) to the device ids.

We use two special audio device IDs in Chromium.
"default" is a device ID that designates the default audio output device. It works on all platforms.
Windows also has the concept of a "default communications device". We use the special ID "communications" to designate this device.
We do not use obfuscated IDs for these special IDs because their purpose is to provide clients with a well-known way to select the default or default communications devices.

This is neither a bug nor a security issue.
The purpose of device IDs being unique per origin is to prevent fingerprinting across origins.
Since all clients have a "default" and a "communications" device, fingerprinting is not possible.

The other IDs, which designate actual devices are the result of the real device are produced with a hash of the actual device ID (which would allow fingerprinting), the origin and a salt.

guidou@ thanks for the clarification. we see default all the time as the only device on chrome os. was this recently added to chrome, we were not seeing this for windows machines until recently. before then, not all windows machines had "communications" listed

The chromium audio stack in ChromeOS currently allows output to the default device only. 
There has been some progress to support nondefault devices on ChromeOS. Recently, the ability to enumerate nondefault audio devices was added (https://codereview.chromium.org/2079843003), but output is still only to the default device.

The communications device ID was added several versions ago to the Windows version of Chromium.