To that I call bullshit. This is where my own article get a little murky - because I talk about the NSA stuff now. People thought I was getting tinfoil-hat-ish (the article was popular on N4G when it went up so I was reading comments there... always fun). My point wasn't so much that the Kinect was going to be a NSA device. My point was that microsoft can't say stuff like "Microsoft has a strong track record of implementing some of the best privacy protection measures in the industry." Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks taught us that this isn't even close to true, Microsoft. You get no trust on this subject. And while I like albert penello quite a bit... I don't trust him on this subject either. They lost their trust with the NSA thing.
I don't entirely agree with that reasoning. Of course the NSA leaks don't help trusting MS or any other US company in the way they handle confidential data, but there are two very different things to consider on that topic : data collection and data access.
As far as I know, MS has a clean record on data collection (unlike Google or Apple for example). They do have a lot of information on their servers, but all of it has been approved by the user. They even admitted that user login through face recognition won't be supported on other consoles than yours, because your biometric data will never leave your console.
Other points I wanted to mention in this fast moving topic :
- NSA and marketing are very different, so people should stop mixing both. Marketing is only interested in you as a statistic. They don't want to know who you are, but what kind of people you are. That's why they're fine with aggregated data (like "27% of people betwwen 25 and 45 have watched this ad" and not "Mr John Smith in Seattle watched that ad yesterday at 7PM"). NSA of course is only interested in people to detect specific individuals.
- using kinect or cameras to detect user emotions is mostly a pipe dream. You can detect easy ones like a laugh (your phone camera already does), but everything else would be too subtle or user dependant to be reliable. If you read scientific publications about emotion detection through computer vision, you will notice that they all use pictures with exaggerated emotions, while someone watching a show would have
the same emotion chart as Steven Seagal.
- another thing about emotions : marketing doesn't really care about them. If you provide them with that information, they'll just ignore it because it has no quantitative value. All performance indicators are based on numbers and tranformation rates. They want to know how many peope watched an ad, how many clicked on it, or how many bought the product. Not "did that ad make them sad ?".
I don't claim an entertainment system can't be abused to breach privacy, with or without a camera. But I think many people are just overreacting or drawing false conclusions (which doesn't surprise me any more here, but it's still disappointing). And most of all, there's no reason to be specifically suspicious of MS, especially since they've been quite clear from the beginning with what they're doing with your data and what they're not.
I mean think about the kinect. I know some people are hopeful and I really don't like pissing on anyone's parade but the kinect has been out for THREE YEARS and they haven't made a compelling experience for it outside of dancing/fitness.
That's because you're watching at your feet instead of watching around you. Kinect is not a gaming device, it is a user interface device (that can be used for gaming). Every other day I can see a new demo of a cool prototype from a new startup and there is a kinect appearing in the corner. There are publications and projects from Microsoft Research on dozens of different topics, all using kinect (simulating 3D TV, real-time 3D modeling, holographic interfaces, ...). All the robotics labs working in computer vision switched to kinect for their reseach projects because it makes their life so much easier...
You can't dismiss all of that because "they couldn't make a game I like with that device".