....cable boxes!
Can my cable company really hear me through my TV speaker?
"The answer is yes and no. Let me explain. The TV is comprised mainly of two sensory related technologies, specifically sound and sight. One is audio (sound) the other is video (sight). Let's first examine audio. Audio technology, or the telephone, was first invented by Alexander Graham Bell. During his experiments, Bell found that the microphone part and the speaker part of the telephone were nearly identical as both use vibrations to work. The microphone uses a membrane to detects sound vibrations from our voice and converts it to an electrical signal; then the speaker also uses a membrane to convert the electrical signal back to sound which we hear. because of this , a microphone can be used as a speaker and a speaker can be use as a microphone. To prove this, all you need to do is plug any external computer speaker into your microphone jack, and speak in a chat room or record. Now you know it works. Getting on to the question of can your cable company hear you through your TV speaker. It depends. The first question is whether you have a cable box or not. If you do not, you in all likelyhood have nothing to be concernd about. Were the cable company to attempt to listen in on any TV speaker-microphones just by plugging into their cable, they would hear every speaker transmitting from every one of their subscribers' TVs, resulting in nothing but a great homogenous noise or whoosing sound. That is useless to listen in on. On the other hand, if you have a cable box, the story is quite different. With a cable box, the cable companies have given you an "address". This address is needed to differentiate you from every other sunscriber on their network so they can know where to send an 'on-demand' movie that you may have just ordered. Inside that cable box is a chip that allows the cable company technicians to pinpoint and single you out of the thousands of other subscribers. If they want, as they do with 'on-demand' movies, at a moments notice they can create a selective connection between their main office equipment and 'their' cable box which is connected to your TV and your TV's speaker. Remember what we learned earlier about a speaker being used as a microphone. Now, with their selective connection using their cable box, they can listen in to your room using your TV's speaker as a microphone. So be careful what you say, "Big Brother" may be listening."