Poll: Xbone, kinect and privacy issues.

[doomed89]

What? No voice recognition? No Biometrics?

I would say you need to catch up on your software and hardware.

Also if you are in the united states I urge you to check up on the laws regarding the recording of individuals. You will find they are highly illegal unless ALL parties are notified and agree.

e.g. Consent should be given prior to the recording, and should either be in writing or recorded verbally, or a warning that the conversation is being taped should be recorded.

ofcourse it would also depend on the individual states laws and then country for the rest of the world.

Microsoft is no newbie to being sued.

There are 3rd party programs you can use to make the mic have voice recognition but as far as I know no ordinary webcam is capable of reading biometrics, either way it's different then having it built into the hardware that has access to memory on your console and a MS server if you are offline and again MS doesn't even have to record you to spy on you (seriously read my first post) they can have kinect do all the work and only save the data they are interested in ie how many times a certain product was mention in a good way versus a bad way, physical changes when viewing an ad, how many users actually watched/looked at the ad ect. no law covers any of that, and again you probably did agree to it.

 

[Kittyhawk]

After the NSA spy revelations, we should certainly distrust this thing, even from MS. Hey, anyone remember the tale of a nice school and the laptops they gave to students, and later spied on them in their homes? Yep, they were in a position of trust and power too and abused it with ease.

Gamers don't want Kinect (we had enough with the original) but are being forced to pay for it and use it too. And if there is no alternative Xbone sku without Kinect, that speaks volumes of 'MS don't care about gamers privacy, buy and use Kinect or die.'

Its a Johnny Five camera you don't want, so buy your Xbone and enjoy its cool games, but feel free to point its dirty Cyclops like gaze in protest at a window or wall while gaming, or put a box over it. MS will get the message the hard way once again.

 

[doomed89]

After the NSA spy revelations, we should certainly distrust this thing, even from MS. Hey, anyone remember the tale of a nice school and the laptops they gave to students, and later spied on them in their homes? Yep, they were in a position of trust and power too and abused it with ease.

Gamers don't want Kinect (we had enough with the original) but are being forced to pay for it and use it too. And if there is no alternative Xbone sku without Kinect, that speaks volumes of 'MS don't care about gamers privacy, buy and use Kinect or die.'

Its a Johnny Five camera you don't want, so buy your Xbone and enjoy its cool games, but feel free to point its dirty Cyclops like gaze in protest at a window or wall while gaming, or put a box over it. MS will get the message the hard way once again.

It probably won't work if you do that because it doesn't recognize the wall as a human user lol.

 

[Tanakh]

-snip-

You forgot the option "No, I think discovering this kind of espionage would be rather easy and know that the profit MS would get from selling gamers data would be dwarfed by the PR loses and sues", that is, I don't think your info is worth enough to warrant the cost to get it, due that I believe this whole discussion is quite retarded... but that's just me.

Captcha says "BELIVE ME", now that is peculiar.

 

[doodles]

After the NSA spy revelations, we should certainly distrust this thing, even from MS. Hey, anyone remember the tale of a nice school and the laptops they gave to students, and later spied on them in their homes? Yep, they were in a position of trust and power too and abused it with ease.

Gamers don't want Kinect (we had enough with the original) but are being forced to pay for it and use it too. And if there is no alternative Xbone sku without Kinect, that speaks volumes of 'MS don't care about gamers privacy, buy and use Kinect or die.'

Its a Johnny Five camera you don't want, so buy your Xbone and enjoy its cool games, but feel free to point its dirty Cyclops like gaze in protest at a window or wall while gaming, or put a box over it. MS will get the message the hard way once again.

Forgive me my ignorance.... Since when was anyone forced to by a gaming console? I love Halflife games but hate Steam. It be like me saying HL is forcing me to use Steam.
PFFT I do without.

I can understand if you said you were forced to buy a computer as it is damn near essential in todays world maybe even a cell phone, but gaming console?

Also NSA spy revelations. As a person who the military I am quite surprised that civilians thought they werent being listened in on.

 

[faefrost]

Microsoft using the Kinect to spy on people is some conspiracy theory level bullshit.

Besides, couldn't the camera be defeated by a strategically placed blob of blu-tack?

Kind of an awesome idea though. Somewhere out there a spy agency is kicking themselves for not thinking of it earlier.

Not so much. Will MS be using it to "Spy" on people? To watch you wander the house in your underwear? To watch you in some perverse creepy manner? No probably not. But the Kinect is designed to watch your reactions to things. But clear and intentional, such as speech, or subtle emotional such as heart rate. It can track your eye movement and see the exact spot you are watching on screen. And look at MS's huge push away from "gaming" focus and towards the device as an entertainment centerpiece. (TV!) This is a hardware setup that looks like it was designed by and for the advertising world. It is a marketing metadata mill. An ad mans wet dream. Given MS's somewhat creepy patents of recent years (Sony's too), anyone who thinks that they do not fully realize this about their new system is deluded. This thing is designed to measure what you are watching, what you like and what you respond to on screen. Occam's Razor applies. It's the simplest cleanest explanation for the features, the requirements and the change in system focus.

 

[doodles]

Microsoft using the Kinect to spy on people is some conspiracy theory level bullshit.

Besides, couldn't the camera be defeated by a strategically placed blob of blu-tack?

Kind of an awesome idea though. Somewhere out there a spy agency is kicking themselves for not thinking of it earlier.

Not so much. Will MS be using it to "Spy" on people? To watch you wander the house in your underwear? To watch you in some perverse creepy manner? No probably not. But the Kinect is designed to watch your reactions to things. But clear and intentional, such as speech, or subtle emotional such as heart rate. It can track your eye movement and see the exact spot you are watching on screen. And look at MS's huge push away from "gaming" focus and towards the device as an entertainment centerpiece. (TV!) This is a hardware setup that looks like it was designed by and for the advertising world. It is a marketing metadata mill. An ad mans wet dream. Given MS's somewhat creepy patents of recent years (Sony's too), anyone who thinks that they do not fully realize this about their new system is deluded. This thing is designed to measure what you are watching, what you like and what you respond to on screen. Occam's Razor applies. It's the simplest cleanest explanation for the features, the requirements and the change in system focus.

Sorta like google? Most search engines? This website?

It seems to me people have relatively skewed fears. A persons whole google search history is more informative than how their heart beats when playing generic console game X.

I would be more concerned about the number of people who dont know why their passport since 2010ish has a rather large hard spot in the centre of it but alas Xbox is more important. Sorta like EA is the worst company.

Also when quoting him you negated a major aspect of what he asked. Could one not place something infront of said receiver? It would be like a grip for the controller and you could buy it an a fancy floral pattern or as a God of War symbol and suddenly OMNIPOTENT watcher is a paper weight.

One would have thought the nsa would use something more reliable like pfft monitoring internet communications, cell phones that never truly turn off, social media websites....

 

[doomed89]

You forgot the option "No, I think discovering this kind of espionage would be rather easy and know that the profit MS would get from selling gamers data would be dwarfed by the PR loses and sues", that is, I don't think your info is worth enough to warrant the cost to get it, due that I believe this whole discussion is quite retarded... but that's just me.

Captcha says "BELIVE ME", now that is peculiar.

Only that kind of espionage is factually hard to discover and even harder to prove. Dozens of companies get away with stuff like this not to mention governments (which use said companies), MS is just taking it to the next level.

Not so much. Will MS be using it to "Spy" on people? To watch you wander the house in your underwear? To watch you in some perverse creepy manner? No probably not. But the Kinect is designed to watch your reactions to things. But clear and intentional, such as speech, or subtle emotional such as heart rate. It can track your eye movement and see the exact spot you are watching on screen. And look at MS's huge push away from "gaming" focus and towards the device as an entertainment centerpiece. (TV!) This is a hardware setup that looks like it was designed by and for the advertising world. It is a marketing metadata mill. An ad mans wet dream. Given MS's somewhat creepy patents of recent years (Sony's too), anyone who thinks that they do not fully realize this about their new system is deluded. This thing is designed to measure what you are watching, what you like and what you respond to on screen. Occam's Razor applies. It's the simplest cleanest explanation for the features, the requirements and the change in system focus.

Exactly what I'm saying too bad people aren't reading my first post.

 

[Arakasi]

You're honestly a little too paranoid if you actually think the Kinect will spy on you. It'd be very obvious once it's used up all your internet (if you're limited) and Microsoft would frankly not be that stupid. I wouldn't pick the last poll option and say they'd never do anything wrong because that's stupid, (thanks for strawmanning the position OP) but they certainly wouldn't do this, especially with all the scrutiny that it will be put under.

 

[doodles]

Alot of people have brought up privacy issues with kinect seeing how the Xbone won't work without it pluged in with even it's "off" mode is just a sleep mode which Microsoft has confirmed the voice reconition feature still works (ie the mic works too) and the whole prism thing. Now people have made the argument that nobody is going to sit through billions of hours of footage of nothing and only if they have a reason to look at you specifically, but here's the thing they don't have too.

Kinect is capable of reading bio-metrics and voice/facial recognition, what that means is kinect can do the bulk of the spying without humans ever watching or listening to anything. Personally I think it will be used to gather market data which will be then sold off to third parties more then anything government related but the possibilities as I see them are like this: Program kinect to listen for key words like ps4, pepsi, cola ect. and follow up words like plan to buy, hate, great ect. or even program it to start recording for a bit and save it to a partitioned space in the harddrive then send it to MS when the console next goes online and have someone filter through the remainder (still a lot of work but it just became logistically possible) or with the bio-metrics use it to gauge the effectiveness of ads either in the tv features or dashboard/xbl ads and use that data to make ads more effective.

Now some people might not see this as a problem since most of that information isn't personal in the least, to those who don't have a problem with it I have one question, why are you paying more for kinect to be MSes lab rat? They should pay you as a focus tester or something if they are going to do this not the other way around.

Ill bite since you say no one is reading your first post.

Firstly you are using improper wording. The kinect is a input device which does as stated. The software on the xbox itself does the actual processing of the data the kinect records. IE its software ie all they really needed was a sophisticated enough camera to get detailed imagery.

I also ask is not the current kinect capable of all that you state?( microphone wise as the higher resolution capture is only in the xbox1 version)?

Also I also quoted state law. which requires ALL party consent with written or recorded consent. It is not hard at all to monitor what data leaves your internet connection. Ofcourse other companies have done things like this and continue to do really, but what makes this so special?

You also dont take into account in your theory European privacy laws which are much more stringent. The EU is not afraid to punish Microsoft as they have shown numerous times. Heck Google has had a erase all data order in 24 hours limit placed on it in the last week.

 

[ShinyCharizard]

I would be surprised if they didn't data mine it and sell that info to advertisers. Still it's the fact that the kinect is just plain shit that makes me not want it.

 

[doodles]

Well rather what makes one assume they arent already datamining console gaming records and selling them. Heck I doubt it even has to be up to the console itself. Game publishers probably note how long you look at x and y already.

 

[doomed89]

You're honestly a little too paranoid if you actually think the Kinect will spy on you. It'd be very obvious once it's used up all your internet (if you're limited) and Microsoft would frankly not be that stupid. I wouldn't pick the last poll option and say they'd never do anything wrong because that's stupid, (thanks for strawmanning the position OP) but they certainly wouldn't do this, especially with all the scrutiny that it will be put under.

Read the first post.

Ill bite since you say no one is reading your first post.

Firstly you are using improper wording. The kinect is a input device which does as stated. The software on the xbox itself does the actual processing of the data the kinect records. IE its software ie all they really needed was a sophisticated enough camera to get detailed imagery.

I also ask is not the current kinect capable of all that you state?( microphone wise as the higher resolution capture is only in the xbox1 version)?

Also I also quoted state law. which requires ALL party consent with written or recorded consent. It is not hard at all to monitor what data leaves your internet connection. Ofcourse other companies have done things like this and continue to do really, but what makes this so special?

You also dont take into account in your theory European privacy laws which are much more stringent. The EU is not afraid to punish Microsoft as they have shown numerous times. Heck Google has had a erase all data order in 24 hours limit placed on it in the last week.

Wrong Kinect has it's own processor. At least the original did and I really don't think they changed it for xbox one and using that kind of software on a pc is completely impossible on a large scale without being noticed because it takes up a lot of resources not to mention having to download the software without the users knowlege (this is less of a problem) and I don't think most laptop cameras are that detailed anyways (I'm not positive though since I haven't seen a laptop made in the last 3 years camera quality).

The current kinect is almost capable of it but not quite, the voice recognition is too hit and miss, and it can't read bio-metrics or track eye's properly as well as it can be turned off and isn't required for the 360 to be on separately which significantly reduces the amount of quality data they could get, and they wouldn't know if the data was accurate or not and if they went through it with people it would take a lot more because of the hit and miss voice recognition software. Also 360 was made before kinect so it doesn't have part of the harddrive separated for any data MS is collecting and putting something like that in a firmware update is problematic (though not impossible). So no the current kinect isn't capable of it, and if the current kinect isn't I seriously doubt a random laptop camera and mic are.

Again MS doesn't have to technically record you to get the data they want and "spy" on you, and they could make it so you have to say "I Agree" to the TOS instead of just clicking okay, or they could ignore it like you pointed out other companies do without reaction.

MS ignores other countries with their features, so if a country was problematic for this kind of "market research" they could just not do it there.

Well rather what makes one assume they arent already datamining console gaming records and selling them. Heck I doubt it even has to be up to the console itself. Game publishers probably note how long you look at x and y already.

I'm certainly not assuming they don't but with kinect they can go way beyond just console records, they could use kinect to ease drop on conversations and gather data about what products you like or don't like and how you react to ads and such.

 

[doodles]

"Although the sensor unit was originally planned to contain a microprocessor that would perform operations such as the system's skeletal mapping, it was revealed in January 2010 that the sensor would no longer feature a dedicated processor. Instead, processing would be handled by one of the processor cores of the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/microsoft-drops-internal-natal-chip_1

Unless that info is incorrect.

 

[Arakasi]

You're honestly a little too paranoid if you actually think the Kinect will spy on you. It'd be very obvious once it's used up all your internet (if you're limited) and Microsoft would frankly not be that stupid. I wouldn't pick the last poll option and say they'd never do anything wrong because that's stupid, (thanks for strawmanning the position OP) but they certainly wouldn't do this, especially with all the scrutiny that it will be put under.

Read the first post.

I did, and it changes nothing. Microsoft may be stupid but they aren't that stupid.

 

[doomed89]

"Although the sensor unit was originally planned to contain a microprocessor that would perform operations such as the system's skeletal mapping, it was revealed in January 2010 that the sensor would no longer feature a dedicated processor. Instead, processing would be handled by one of the processor cores of the Xbox 360's Xenon CPU."

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/microsoft-drops-internal-natal-chip_1

Unless that info is incorrect.

"Despite Microsoft Corp.'s claims to the contrary, its new Kinect motion-gaming ad-on for the Xbox 360 uses a standalone applications processor marketed by Marvell Technology Group Ltd. , according to a teardown analysis of the Kinect performed by UBM TechInsights. "

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4210757/Teardown--Kinect-has-processor-after-all

I did, and it changes nothing. Microsoft may be stupid but they aren't that stupid.

Then you didn't understand it because it wouldn't even come close to using up your internet and it would be nearly impossible to tell if it was spying on you and how would using kinect to spy and gather market data be stupid?

 

[Brotha Desmond]

I assume people who chose "Microsoft respects my privacy" did so out of a joke. Microsoft has proven they don't care about privacy.

 

[doomed89]

I assume people who chose "Microsoft respects my privacy" did so out of a joke. Microsoft has proven they don't care about privacy.

To be fair the they will record everything option is just as ridicules.

 

[Anthony Corrigan]

I understand where you are coming from, and I agree up to a point. However, there is a difference between being capable of doing something and actually doing it. We are all capable of many things that we never do for moral reasons. I mean, I could see Microsoft doing it if, say, they were helping to gather evidence against some kind of criminal. But just because it's feasible for Microsoft to spy on everybody with an Xbone through Kinect doesn't mean they actually will. That would just be a PR nightmare waiting to happen that would dwarf that caused by the DRM.

I was going to laugh at you for implying MS wouldn't do it for moral reasons but then you said for PR reasons which is a bit more reasonable but honestly how would people know? Getting solid court level evidence of something like that is next to impossible, they buried the true failrate of the 360 ffs and that was a very public thing with local stores and average people seeing it and especially since MS is in league with prism they probably have significant legal leeway so even if someone stole documents proving it they'd probably never see the light of day outside of a rumor site. Also it seems to me xbone was made for this, always online with a camera with voice recognition not only being bundled but being required for the system to run as well as tv features, it seems tailor made for this kind of "market research" and I doubt MS would abandon it unless there was a very public outcry like there was with the DRM but this is something that will never be that public.

Firstly why do you care about government more than companies? In reality companies are likely to do FAR more harm to you than the government will

As for the rest how would you know? well this is considered a surveillance device under NSW (at least) law and therefore Microcrap MUST be upfront about what it will use it for at POS. That means they must tell the EB staff and the EB staff MUST inform the customer. They can't change this down the track or they will be in breach of the law. Now sure they could TRY to do it surreptitiously but what are the chances that not one person in the whole world would work it out and then post it on the internet?

what they WILL use it for (if they can get away with it) because they have already got the patients to do it, is to check up on who is using it, how many people are watching it and forcing you to buy more based on THERE determination that to many people are watching. Further more there has been talk about using methods to make sure people actually watch content and rewarding them with DLC for it. That wont be the cut scenes from a new Mass effect which people WANT to watch because they are invested in the story, that will be ads and even MORE unethical is the idea floated of getting users to hold up products to prove their loyalty to the Overlord Kinect.

Now some of this maybe impossible now that it is a real console but they could always down the track reverse that decision again

 

[Requia]

And there is a difference between prison and jail.

There is? Could you elaborate on that, please?

Jail is where the police hold you in custody after being arrested. Prison is where you go after being convicted and sentenced.

Not necessarily. Jails are short term holding, prisons are long term. But you can go to jail post sentence if its a short one, and you can go to prison while on trial if you don't make bail.