Your own technology is spying on you

Mainstream technology news outlets are increasingly becoming aware
of the many ways, both new and old, in which gadgets and technology
can be and in many cases certainly is being used to spy on us.

What is less widely reported is the finding some time ago that cable TV
and satellite boxes include microphones, and indeed have done since
the earliest models, which means they appear to be designed to work
as listening devices (bugs) in the average living room — planted in
millions of homes. This would be a powerful facility, particularly in
conjunction with the monitoring and speech recognition operation of
Echelon/Prism, details of which were recently leaked by NSA
whistleblower Mr Snowden. In the UK the first major roll-out of cable TV
infrastructure with two-way comms was carried out in the mid 1990s out
by NTL, a US company with suspected close links with the intelligence
services, under an exclusive licence granted by the British authorities.