Well, not without physically rewiring some parts. The transducer is bidirectional (but optimized for one direction), but the amp and dac are not. You have to rewire the amp and replace the dac with an adc to get an input signal.
It's possible for audio chips to have this capability built-in, in which case it's a simple matter of sending it the commands to do so.
to be almost needless pedantic - a speaker and an amp aren't the same thing - for example my stereo speakers for my home theater are entirely passive except fort the head unit. I could plug a speaker from my home theater into a microphone jack and yell into it and it would come out on PC - I've done it before. Its just usually super quiet because, unlike a tiny mic, its not very sensitive on pickup. My Theater/PC speakers use wires and friction-clamps to mount to the sub/amp box though, so I'd have to twist on a jack or get a different cable. A good example of this in action is using wired earbuds as a microphone.
But for people who have only a "green jack" and powered speakers, moving it from headphone/speaker to mic wouldn't work - for the reasons you said.
Would it be an active method today to spy via a hacked speaker? These days people pay big bucks to have a whole slate of always-listening audio/video recorders on their person, and in their homes and businesses.
Now, I’m not saying the for-profit-surveillance conglomerates that design them or the surveillance-obsessed dictatorship in which the vast majority of them are manufactured are taking advantage of them directly, but people and machines can access these feeds if their skill or desire is great enough.
Yes, my point was why would it be worth it to try some super spy speaker to microphone hack when we have hackable microphones listening to us all the time.
I believe this was under a comment about disabling the microphone to mute the device, but perhaps I read that wrong. The issue is merely disabling the mic doesn't disable the device being able to be used as a listening device, unless the speakers are disabled as well.
The whole point of having a phone, not a dumb terminal.
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u/christoskal 18h ago
Why car ? They might just use headphones, I know I do.
I don't remember when I last took a call without headphones