![]() ![]() Microsoft also takes pains to point out privacy restrictions with Xbox, telling The Verge last year that it does not collect personal information about users, including images, and send it to corporate servers via Kinect. I’m prepared to call Microsoft equally sincere in its reply, if only because allowing a consumer device to be part of a widespread spying program would be a public relations nightmare that would destroy the Xbox as a product. ![]() in calling for strict controls on government surveillance through the Internet. Microsoft has joined other tech companies in the U.S. I contacted Microsoft Canada for comment and its PR folks replied with much the same answer: they were unaware of such a spying program and strongly opposed any such action by government. Nothing in the story suggests that notion was followed up on or succeeded. According to The Guardian, that same British snooping program considered the original version of the Kinect, then available for the Xbox 360, as another device to snoop with. The Yahoo revelation had me thinking about my friend’s family and their wariness about the Kinect. Yahoo’s track record on opposing government surveillance apparently suggests its reaction is sincere, even if it has been slower than competitors like Google in protecting its services against spying. Yahoo told The Guardian it knew nothing about the intelligence operation and condemned it as a violation of its service. Whether the effort caught any terrorists was not revealed, according to The Guardian which broke the story, but it did catch an awful lot of pictures of naked people in front of their PCs, which tells you more about webcam chats than you want to know. News surfaced last week that a British intelligence agency had tapped into Yahoo’s webcam chat service and retrieved still images and information from millions of chats around the globe between 20. There’s no absolutely no evidence that the Kinect on your Xbox is taking pictures of you and sending them to the NSA, but its location in living rooms, rec rooms and even bedrooms make it a fine surveillance device. That paranoia might not be so farfetched, at least in general terms. The Kinect’s camera and microphone, which are central to controlling the Xbox One by voice and gesture commands, creeped him out. ![]() A friend of mine whose family has an Xbox One recently told me her son detached the Kinect camera almost as soon as they got the new console for Christmas. ![]()
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