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WiiBox3 on 08 October 2013
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Hornet303 said:
WiiBox3 said:
Hornet303 said:

This actually is a pretty big deal in my eyes.  Never has there been a camera in your house where most of the people will congregate and have the "potential" for capturing a TON of information.  It could "potentially" know who you are, what colors you like to wear.  How much weight you've gained in the past month.  Whether you're sick or you're healthy. What you smoke, what you drink, what you eat, what time you go to bed, what time you wake up etc..  Sure this can be used for good, but could potentially be used for gain.

I also MS has filed for : http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2012-11-06-microsoft-applies-for-pay-per-viewer-patent

Now if you want to buy an MMA fight for you and your friends, maybe instead of 40 bux, its now 120 cause they can count how many viewers are watching.

I am for data collection.  It has many useful purposes, but willingly putting something in your home for someone to potentially watch is concerning.  What if police/FBI/NSA corner MS because they believe someone commited a crime.  We'll maybe they're not using that info for advertising, but hmm, we have all the above details about these people, we better turn it over.

What about the current Kinect or the PS Eye?

As for the advertising patent, companies apply for patents all of the time. Most patents are never used. If they started charging for PPV this way, people would unplug the XBO and find another way to watch the content.

Yeah Im not really doing a comparison with other technologies.  Any camera in your house with a network connected to it could do something similar.  I dont have a Gen 1 Kinect (do have a 360), nor a PSEye (do have a PS3).  Im not a tin-foil hat type of guy and generally dont have a lot to hide from, but I do get annoyed by advertising.  Some people can watch TV for a few hours watching 15-20 minutes of commercials an hour w/o hesistating, but I find it annoying.  You're right about the patent and unconnecting Kinect if its going to count people watching. 

I guess it all comes down to how tastefully its done.  If the data never leaves your xbox, thats at least sounds nice.  Someone will surely span a network port and run wireshark on the mirrored port to see what gets transmitted back to MS.  If they default the advertising to OFF and turn data collection submittal to OFF by default then thats a step in the right direction.  If its all turned on, they're betting on folks not paying attention (and there are a lot of people like that) and they can make some good $$ on the folks that dont realize they're being targeted.

Again, this isnt a Sony vs Microsoft response, its about any company that wants to put a super smart networked camera in your living room.


Thanks for the clarification. You are right that there will be users looking into what data is sent to and from the console and we will have a better understanding of all of the speculation.