Groan. Tinfoil-hat type people should probably avoid cell phones, laptops, and tablets with cameras too.

It's just a program.  There's an achievement in the Kinect game Happy Action Theater that gives you the credit if there's four people (or is it six? I can't remember.) posing at one time.  Same thing for Dance Central if you dance with a partner and yes, you can earn these Achievements offline.  There isn't some tiny guy in my Kinect watching me.  If there were, he'd be traumatised by now.  The sensor just knows when a set number of people are in front of the device just like your PS3 knows when there's four controllers plugged in. 

And yeah, just wait for it to come to DVD/Blu Ray.  You can give it away to 100 different people if you want.  The priveledge of watching a movie that's in theaters day one in your own home is either going to be higher prices (which they already offer) or a way to restrict the number of viewers.  Stop being paranoid.

Do you honestly believe that there is a group of people working for Microsoft (or some other secret organization) that get paid to sit and monitor your Kinect habits? That, at any moment, there is a team of people in black suits ready to charge into your house if you watch porn on your Xbox?

We live in a time where there is face tracking tech, finger tracking, etc. I'm sure that Microsoft's idea is that, if the Kinect Sensor sees more than (I don't know--let's pull five out of my ass) five people watching the movie or whatever, it can say "Sorry. You only paid for four people. There are six of you." and it will stop the movie.

And, it's just a patent. People were going crazy before Kinect launched saying that Microsoft would be spying on us. That didn't happen.

It's their product and service, and we pay for it. As far as I'm concerned they can do whatever the hell they want. We can all just stop paying for their service whenever we feel like it.


This is a huge non-issue.

What if Kinect recognizes products that appear in your living room to determine what ads to show you based on that. Living room cookies.

Kinect can't read!  Kinect is retarded!

They are upgrading the tech, besides it can take pictures can't it? Not everything is infared beams with it. Though this goes with any kind of camera and I don't think they will actually do this or that people would be happy if they did.

Yeah, it does have a camera.  But then, what makes it more of a threat than the PSEye, the Xbox Live Vision Camera, the Web Cam on my laptop that I'm using right now, my Vita/3DS cameras, or my cell phone?

I bolded your last line because I think you already sense how likely it is for this to happen.  I just wanted to point this out to the OP.

Let's see the positive side of this thing: if MS patented it, we can skip it altogether using competing products.

That's why I have the kinect facing the T.V when I'm not using it.