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AdvertisingAge: Xbox One's Data Treasure Trove Could Reshape Marketing

Perhaps, if the suggestion is that Medhi has been taken out of context Microsoft can release the notes, slides or transcripts of his presentation.

I just looked at the ANA conference site and the conference seems to have been recorded and streamed - they could even release the video...
 

hawk2025

Member

Or, you know, right on their advertising website, with respect to the 360:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox

Advertising on Xbox 360 transforms passive TV advertising into something interactive, immersive, and actionable, redefining the relationship between consumers and brands with amazing new advertising opportunities. Through technologies like Kinect and NUads (Natural User Interface Ads), advertising on Xbox 360 allows consumers to connect with brands in powerful ways.


And here's the Toyota case study, which was a resounding success:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/cl/2922/toyota-xbox-case-study

NUads (Natural User Interface Ads) on Xbox 360 offered the perfect way for Toyota to connect and engage with their target audience. Through gesture and voice, people were able to interact with the campaign by participating in a poll. The campaign featured video ads as well.
 

Shinta

Banned
Or, you know, right on their advertising website, with respect to the 360:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox

640.gif
 
I was referring more to this part: "The comments in Ad Age attributed to Yusuf Mehdi were not in relation to Kinect."

Microsoft seems to be saying Ad Age is misinterpreting Medhi's comments to be in relations to future uses of Kinect. I may have missed it, but what then was he talking about if not Kinect? Are you saying he was just talking about customers choosing options and things when confronted with ads (that's still in relation to Kinect anyway, just in a less insidious way).

It would help with transparency if they just released more details of this talk.
 

Shinta

Banned
I was referring more to this part: "The comments in Ad Age attributed to Yusuf Mehdi were not in relation to Kinect."

Microsoft seems to be saying Ad Age is misinterpreting Medhi's comments to be in relations to future uses of Kinect. I may have missed it, but what then was he talking about? Are you saying he was just talking about customers choosing options and things when confronted with ads (that's still in relation to Kinect anyway, just in a less insidious way).

It would help with transparency if they just released more details of this talk.

I know. If you look at that article, someone else at Microsoft was saying comments almost exactly like Mehdi's 3 years ago at a similar conference for advertisers.

There's nothing to release really. They're planning on using Kinect for advertising, and have been for some time.

That's my take on it at least.
 

CLEEK

Member
Or, you know, right on their advertising website, with respect to the 360:

http://advertising.microsoft.com/en-us/xbox

So to recap, the PR line from Albert in the last day or two that MS have no plans for targeted ads using Kinect and no-one has worked on it is only true if:

Albert has never met or known of the work of Yusuf Mehdi - Vice President of Marketing and Strategy or Dennis Durkin, the chief operating officer of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment division, or anyone in the Xbox LIVE Advertising team or read the Xbox website.

Plausible deniability only works if it's plausible!
 

KoopaTheCasual

Junior Member
Microsoft seems to be saying Ad Age is misinterpreting Medhi's comments to be in relations to future uses of Kinect. I may have missed it, but what then was he talking about if not Kinect? Are you saying he was just talking about customers choosing options and things when confronted with ads (that's still in relation to Kinect anyway, just in a less insidious way).

It would help with transparency if they just released more details of this talk.
You get some clues from the article:
http://m.adage.com/article?articleSection=specialreport:anaannualmeeting2013&articleSectionName=SpecialReport:ANAAnnualMeeting2013&articleid=http%3A%2F%2Fadage.com%2Fanaannualmeeting2013%2Farticle%3Farticle_id%3D244605

Kinect is mentioned explicitly.

The original always online requirement, wich is mentioned, makes so much sense in the tageted ad context.
 

coolasj19

Why are you reading my tag instead of the title of my post?
If anyone gives a shit I recorded a podcast today based largely on shit from this thread... and then spreading out to other topics.
Why the Xbox One will fail.
Fair and balanced™
I liked this. Surprisingly enough. Didn't think 1 person could fill up an hour like that.

Perhaps, if the suggestion is that Medhi has been taken out of context Microsoft can release the notes, slides or transcripts of his presentation.
I just looked at the ANA conference site and the conference seems to have been recorded and streamed - they could even release the video...
When I read this I had to wipe off my screen. NOT FROM YOU. But, I gave that idea about half a second before just realizing the MS would never ever do that. It's a good idea, but they won't do it because it'll do more harm than good. Imagine how disgusting hearing all that advertising drivel.
It's not drivel, I just wanted to use the word.

Know what guys? I'm not even mad anymore. It's boiled over for me and I've just accepted that this crap is going to happen. Of course, I'll do my part to try and dissuade MS from doing it and saying words and opinions when I feel it's needed but, whatever. I can only hope that I can get the message out to my circle of friends and I can stop more people from unwittingly falling into this FUD* Trap. I think nearly every person on the hardcore side has been made aware and now it's just the slow seep into the casuals and then the non-gamers. I'd sell my 360, but I haven't played all the exclusives I've bought for them yet. Which, telling enough, are all over 3-4 years old. And, it has the best version of Yugioh 5D's, not that I play it because I like Yugioh anymore, but because it's a card game that I know the rules to, and it's fun to play it while listening to podcasts.

TL;DR : Anger has turned right round into seething disappointment. Which, I might argue, is a much more negative emotion.
*
I don't have the strongest grasp on the word FUD but I think the is the right context.
 
How about bringing online gaming to the masses. It was a brilliant long term move by them to bring all these people into their ecosystem with their friends. Moving those people over to PSN will be Sony's biggest challenge next gen

Looking at all the pre-orders and general positive outlook plus superior online service and price (cheaper paywall) it looks like it won't be difficult to migrate all the xbox live players over to a superior ecosystem. Especially once the power difference is displayed for everyone to see in multiplats.
 

xiong644

Neo Member
Funny Gamespot said are you interested in buying a windows to your living room after their report on the topic.

Windows to your living room = Windows OS coincidence? I think NOT! LUL
 

Snubbers

Member
If anyone gives a shit I recorded a podcast today based largely on shit from this thread... and then spreading out to other topics.


Why the Xbox One will fail.


Fair and balanced™

Personally, I'll take the same jaded view of Sony, Google, Apple and MS, the Sony Patent for their ads that required you to cheer for it to carry on should be enough to tell you that despite the PR friendly face of Sony at the moment, its still very much got a corporate mentality internally.

I also differentiate NSA privacy issues from advertising privacy, whether that's me being ignorant, or being rational about it, I don't know, but it sure flies in the face of modern GAF, and you are very much more alifgned with your opinion.
 
Maybe Albert Penello or someone else could fill us in what Mr Mehdi was talking about in the quote above? If it's not related to Kinect then what is it?

I feel like this is going to be a long one.

First, let's go back to what I originally posted on this topic on the 10/2. It was in an unrelated thread, so I'm not surprised if people missed it. There seems to be a high degree of selective quoting, so let's start here, because I posted this having no idea Yusuf would be at an advertising conference 4 days later. That was certainly ironic.

Well I think there's two things you're asking. NuAds by definition is simply interactive advertising done on the platform. Using the functions of the console and Kinect to interact vs. just watching a spot. There's nothing particularly interesting happening here unless you're in the advertising business, and we've done a few on Xbox 360 today.

What I think you're asking about is an interview done earlier in the year where someone was talking about how some of the new Xbox One Kinect features *could* be used in advertising - since we can see expressions, engagement, etc. and how that might be used to target advertising. This is the point that seems to draw some controversy.

First - nobody is working on that. We have a lot more interesting and pressing things to dedicate time towards. It was an interview done speculatively, and I'm not aware of any active work in this space.

Second - if something like that ever happened, you can be sure it wouldn't happen without the user having control over it. Period.

Two examples of how we deal with similar things today:

First, Kinect can recognize your face and log you in automatically. There could be some cool features we could enable if we stored that data in the cloud, like being able to be auto-recognized at a friend's. I get asked for that feature a lot. But, for privacy reasons, your facial data doesn't leave the console.

Second: You'll see us do some things around Skype that freezes the video when Skype is not in focus (meaning, it's not the primary app). If you go back to the home screen, or launch another app, we actually stop the video stream. We do this so the user can't even ACCIDENTALLY have the video stream going on in the background.

I'll say this - we take a lot of heat around stuff we've done and I can roll with it. Some of it is deserved. But preventing Kinect from being used inappropriately is something the team takes very seriously.

Hope that helps.

My point on this I guess I thought was clear. Lots of people had talked about it speculating on what could be done. But before anything actually HAPPENS, as in we ship something that people experience, there has to be real development work to enable it. Nobody on the engineering team is doing that work. Everyone is focused on launch. As I see the features coming POST launch, for the foreseeable future, there are a lot of things the team will be working on and I haven't seen any work items around this then either. So as far as I can tell, for at least the next year, the development team isn't doing any work around advertising and Kinect. Since there (were) over 6000 people working on Xbox, its possible somebody, somewhere MAY be doing something with this.

Ok so then Yusuf is at an advertising conference. If you review the original article, it's VERY unclear what he said regarding Kinect. In fact, in reference specifically to Kinect, the author says "But perhaps the biggest potential impact is one Mr. Mehdi only hinted at -- the possibility of making data from Xbox available for market research."

http://adage.com/article/special-report-ana-annual-meeting-2013/xbox-reshape-marketing/244605/

So the author himself says Yusuf only "hinted" then goes on to speculate on a bunch of things.

Without talking to Yusuf, or anyone about the event, at 11:20 PM I posted my thoughts on the article.

Nothing I said yesterday is inconsistent with Yusuf's interview. People appear to be combining different parts of the interview to try and make another point.

Clearly Yusuf is talking about the TV and NFL stuff in terms of "putting together in a unifying way" It's also clear that anything around using Kinect was "hinted at" and all the remaining comments come from the author.

And finally - he's talking to "Advertising Age" so it would be somewhat obvious he would be talking about advertising type stuff.

I'll reiterate what I said yesterday. The Kinect system already has the ability to detect engagement. We don't track it. We only track Voice if you opt-in. Kinect 2.0 has improved, but not completely changed, the type of data available and you can see we've done very little with it, and it's easy to find a website where we explain in great detail, and in layman's terms, what we do with the Kinect data.

And again, IF any of this type of biometric data were to ever be used for advertising, you could expect like today we'd make it optional to the user. And of course, on top of all of this, we allow it to be disconnected unless the game/experience requires it.

If you look at the facts we make available, and OUR history with Kinect, it would not support that we're going to be doing anything with the data unless it's very clear to the user.

back to your regularly scheduled posting.

Let's see what the original author of the article has to say? I pulled this from the comments section. Bolded parts are mine:

JACK NEFF
BATAVIA, OH
# 3 - Oct 06, 2013 9:45 AM

You're both right that Microsoft has dropped the check-in requirement. My apologies, and we will correct that.

But, Mike, Mr. Mehdi clearly broached the idea of sharing research about television with advertisers, after showing a room full of marketers what Kinect can do. This wasn't in the context of ad targeting on Xbox, but in the context of consumer "understanding." He also said they're not doing this now. Nothing Mr. Penello said in the article referenced contradicts this.

This article clearly says, "if even a fraction of likely Xbox One users could be persuaded to share data," it has potential to become an unprecedented tool for measuring biometric responses to advertising. It's hard to believe Microsoft would or could share this data with advertisers without people's consent, but there are many incentives Xbox users could be offered to opt in to data sharing.


So the author of the article basically confirms his own article was misunderstood. Yusuf was talking about TV and Smartglass, showed a Kinect demo, talked about the potential of Kinect, then said we weren't doing anything. And he read my comments here and basically confirms there is no contradiction.

But since very few people read the article, or read the comment from the author, the PR team felt compelled to issue a statement that was very clear. It validates what *I* said, and it validates what the author clarifies *Yusuf* said - nobody is doing the engineering work to implement this.

Here's an article where the PR team clarifies what Yusuf said.

http://allthingsd.com/20131007/micr...d-data-being-harvested-from-xbox-ones-kinect/

tl:dr

So let's recap what happened here.
I said any reference to using Kinect biometrics for advertising was purely speculative, and we're not doing any development work to implement it.
There was an article with a misleading title and a confusing reference to Yusuf saying something different.
The author of that article clarified in his own comments section that Yusuf was also saying using Kinect biometrics was speculative, and we weren't working on it, and confirmed that what I said and what Yusuf said did not contradict
The PR team issued a clarifying statement to that effect.

So all this perceived inconsistency boils down to an article in AdAge that was basically vague.

I'm going to summarize one more time our stance on this, since people think I dodge the question. It's what I've said before, it's what the PR team just reiterated, and it turns out it's what Yusuf said last week.

We are not working on anything using biometric data from Kinect or anywhere else to target advertising.
No personal information leaves the Xbox One Console
The only biometric data we collect, are voice samples to improve our recognition engine. We only do that when a consumer opts in. There is a very clear checkbox in the Settings menu.
IF anything like this ever gets implemented, we will be clear to consumers and give them the ability to control it. We have historically posed this information online, not buried in a complicated EULA, and I see no reason to think that will change.

So there you go.
 
Long Explanation

Thanks for the post Albert

Question: Do you know (or could ask) what the purpose of tracking user engagement is for?


If you're playing a video game, you need to be engaged as it's interactive so I'm not entirely sure why you would need to track that

I doubt it's a conspiracy but I would love to hear why that was an important metric to consider
 
I feel like this is going to be a long one.

First, let's go back to what I originally posted on this topic on the 10/2. It was in an unrelated thread, so I'm not surprised if people missed it. There seems to be a high degree of selective quoting, so let's start here, because I posted this having no idea Yusuf would be at an advertising conference 4 days later. That was certainly ironic.



My point on this I guess I thought was clear. Lots of people had talked about it speculating on what could be done. But before anything actually HAPPENS, as in we ship something that people experience, there has to be real development work to enable it. Nobody on the engineering team is doing that work. Everyone is focused on launch. As I see the features coming POST launch, for the foreseeable future, there are a lot of things the team will be working on and I haven't seen any work items around this then either. So as far as I can tell, for at least the next year, the development team isn't doing any work around advertising and Kinect. Since there (were) over 6000 people working on Xbox, its possible somebody, somewhere MAY be doing something with this.

Ok so then Yusuf is at an advertising conference. If you review the original article, it's VERY unclear what he said regarding Kinect. In fact, in reference specifically to Kinect, the author says "But perhaps the biggest potential impact is one Mr. Mehdi only hinted at -- the possibility of making data from Xbox available for market research."

http://adage.com/article/special-report-ana-annual-meeting-2013/xbox-reshape-marketing/244605/

So the author himself says Yusuf only "hinted" then goes on to speculate on a bunch of things.

Without talking to Yusuf, or anyone about the event, at 11:20 PM I posted my thoughts on the article.



Let's see what the original author of the article has to say? I pulled this from the comments section. Bolded parts are mine:

JACK NEFF
BATAVIA, OH
# 3 - Oct 06, 2013 9:45 AM

You're both right that Microsoft has dropped the check-in requirement. My apologies, and we will correct that.

But, Mike, Mr. Mehdi clearly broached the idea of sharing research about television with advertisers, after showing a room full of marketers what Kinect can do. This wasn't in the context of ad targeting on Xbox, but in the context of consumer "understanding." He also said they're not doing this now. Nothing Mr. Penello said in the article referenced contradicts this.

This article clearly says, "if even a fraction of likely Xbox One users could be persuaded to share data," it has potential to become an unprecedented tool for measuring biometric responses to advertising. It's hard to believe Microsoft would or could share this data with advertisers without people's consent, but there are many incentives Xbox users could be offered to opt in to data sharing.


So the author of the article basically confirms his own article was misunderstood. Yusuf was talking about TV and Smartglass, showed a Kinect demo, talked about the potential of Kinect, then said we weren't doing anything. And he read my comments here and basically confirms there is no contradiction.

But since very few people read the article, or read the comment from the author, the PR team felt compelled to issue a statement that was very clear. It validates what *I* said, and it validates what the author clarifies *Yusuf* said - nobody is doing the engineering work to implement this.

Here's an article where the PR team clarifies what Yusuf said.

http://allthingsd.com/20131007/micr...d-data-being-harvested-from-xbox-ones-kinect/

tl:dr

So let's recap what happened here.
I said any reference to using Kinect biometrics for advertising was purely speculative, and we're not doing any development work to implement it.
There was an article with a misleading title and a confusing reference to Yusuf saying something different.
The author of that article clarified in his own comments section that Yusuf was also saying using Kinect biometrics was speculative, and we weren't working on it, and confirmed that what I said and what Yusuf said did not contradict
The PR team issued a clarifying statement to that effect.

So all this perceived inconsistency boils down to an article in AdAge that was basically vague.

I'm going to summarize one more time our stance on this, since people think I dodge the question. It's what I've said before, it's what the PR team just reiterated, and it turns out it's what Yusuf said last week.

We are not working on anything using biometric data from Kinect or anywhere else to target advertising.
No personal information leaves the Xbox One Console
The only biometric data we collect, are voice samples to improve our recognition engine. We only do that when a consumer opts in. There is a very clear checkbox in the Settings menu.
IF anything like this ever gets implemented, we will be clear to consumers and give them the ability to control it. We have historically posed this information online, not buried in a complicated EULA, and I see no reason to think that will change.

So there you go.
Albert,

All your comments here come with an unspoken but heavily implied 'yet'. We'd give you the benefit of the doubt, but with everything MS has already done from reveal to now, many of us would feel foolish doing that.
 

Nokterian

Member
Like i said in another thread, it did work well with 360. I mean there is 90% ads on screen and even when paying for gold you still see those ads witch was a reason for me not using my 360 anymore. I miss those old blades.
 

Raide

Member
Thanks for the post Albert

Question: Do you know (or could ask) what the purpose of tracking user engagement is for?



If you're playing a video game, you need to be engaged as it's interactive so I'm not entirely sure why you would need to track that

I doubt it's a conspiracy but I would love to hear why that was an important metric to consider

It could possibly be for the system to check you are engaged before acting on your voice commands. Everyone has a laugh about shouting "Xbox Off!" so maybe the system checks to see if you're actually focused on the system before obeying you.
 

Shosai

Banned
Well, I think that settles it. The data that is and isn't collected, the information that can and can't be collected has been explicitly stated. By this point you'd have to believe in some Area-51 level of black-box software development for some of the delusions in this thread to pan out.
 
Albert,

All your comments here come with an unspoken but heavily implied 'yet'. We'd give you the benefit of the doubt, but with everything MS has already done from reveal to now, many of us would feel foolish doing that.

That's totally fair. People at MS have talked about it enough, that I can see why people would be questioning it,

Me personally, and I'll get in trouble for saying this... I don't like it at all. I wish we never talked about it, and I hope we never do it. Someone posted a link to something similar being said around the original Kinect, and we never did anything. I'm hopeful the same holds true here.
 
Thanks for the post Albert

Question: Do you know (or could ask) what the purpose of tracking user engagement is for?



If you're playing a video game, you need to be engaged as it's interactive so I'm not entirely sure why you would need to track that

I doubt it's a conspiracy but I would love to hear why that was an important metric to consider

Two things

Many times, when you envision a feature, you think about game scenarios. Even though the guys working on Kinect aren't game designers, you always try to think up new ideas. There was an idea in the early days about an Interactive game, think Heavy Rain type thing, where you're interacting with a game character and he's looking right at you. He can see if you're talking, looking away and not paying attention, etc. and the conversation could be dynamic. It was a pretty cool idea, and that's where things like smiling, looking away, heart rate, etc. came up. Heart rate also helps with fitness.

More practically, engagement helps with voice recognition. We do a lot with multiple people in the room and beamforming to know who is talking. It helps with accuracy to know if you're looking at the screen or looking away when determining if you're trying to give a voice command.
 
That's totally fair. People at MS have talked about it enough, that I can see why people would be questioning it,

Me personally, and I'll get in trouble for saying this... I don't like it at all. I wish we never talked about it, and I hope we never do it. Someone posted a link to something similar being said around the original Kinect, and we never did anything. I'm hopeful the same holds true here.

Thank you for being honest.
 

coolasj19

Why are you reading my tag instead of the title of my post?
Before you, yes you, NeoGAF user, comment about anything Albert has said, at the very least go back to his post and read the whole thing. Hopefully, I didn't even need to say this. I don't know why I did assuming it is a given.
I'm going to summarize one more time our stance on this, since people think I dodge the question. It's what I've said before, it's what the PR team just reiterated, and it turns out it's what Yusuf said last week.

We are not working on anything using biometric data from Kinect or anywhere else to target advertising.
No personal information leaves the Xbox One Console
The only biometric data we collect, are voice samples to improve our recognition engine. We only do that when a consumer opts in. There is a very clear checkbox in the Settings menu.
IF anything like this ever gets implemented, we will be clear to consumers and give them the ability to control it. We have historically posed this information online, not buried in a complicated EULA, and I see no reason to think that will change.

So there you go.

Thank you so much for leaving out the I don't knows and the yets and the maybes. Personally, I feel this is the first time I remember us getting an extremely clear cut answer about this stuff. Nothing here can be taken as false, or a technicality, or anything like that. Just facts.

[
Albert,

All your comments here come with an unspoken but heavily implied 'yet'. We'd give you the benefit of the doubt, but with everything MS has already done from reveal to now, many of us would feel foolish doing that.
That's totally fair. People at MS have talked about it enough, that I can see why people would be questioning it,

Me personally, and I'll get in trouble for saying this... I don't like it at all. I wish we never talked about it, and I hope we never do it. Someone posted a link to something similar being said around the original Kinect, and we never did anything. I'm hopeful the same holds true here.
Yup. This is how it's going to be for a very long time Albert. The loss of the benefit of the doubt and more fundamentally, trust, has been in action for a few months now. And it's much, much, harder to build it back up. Got a long road ahead of y'all.

You have no idea how much that comment that might get you in trouble is going to go for perception. Or at the very least my perception of what you say from now on. Stepping out of your bounds and admitting that means ( to me at least ) that you've decided to step out of your job and talk to us as your own singular person, not something that's only PR approved. Hopefully, you talking to us tonight quells the fire in this thread quite a bit. I'm still sad, angry, and most of all, disappointed. But, hey, thanks.
 
That's totally fair. People at MS have talked about it enough, that I can see why people would be questioning it,

Me personally, and I'll get in trouble for saying this... I don't like it at all. I wish we never talked about it, and I hope we never do it. Someone posted a link to something similar being said around the original Kinect, and we never did anything. I'm hopeful the same holds true here.
You know, I went Xbox OG over PS2 back in the day. I never bought a PS2 because games like Amped, Rallisport Pro, and Morrowind were just things I didn't see on PS2. I had an Xbox 360 for the first few years because Playstation 3 was such a mess. After my first 360 RRoD'd (after I finally got a PS3), I bought another 360 solely for ME2 and Forza - but when the PSN network went down and I found that Netflix access was behind a paywall, I made a conscious decision to get all multiplats on PS3. The RRoD was bad enough, but the paywall for Netflix was the straw that broke the gamer's back. I can count the games I got for the 360 on one hand post paywall-irritation (Bayonetta, Trials 1&2, Forza Horizon - I skipped Forza 4, and Halo 4).

You had me from the beginning, but MS is making such short-sighted decisions that I can't get an Xbox One. MS drove me into Sony's arms by making decisions that seemed to ask too much for too little.

Why have these obviously self-destructive decisions been made? You have an image problem but you can't fix it by pulling in your gut or getting a more flattering camera lens. The sooner MS realizes that its image problem has to be fixed by working on the product and policies and not by better representation, the sooner the situation - at least among enthusiasts - will improve. IMHO.
 

dose

Member
Well, I think that settles it. The data that is and isn't collected, the information that can and can't be collected has been explicitly stated. By this point you'd have to believe in some Area-51 level of black-box software development for some of the delusions in this thread to pan out.
The problem is - up until the PRISM reveal - people would probably believe what MS say regarding this matter. After finding out what they are doing regarding personal data and information with the NSA without our knowledge/consent, why should we believe them this time?
 

coolasj19

Why are you reading my tag instead of the title of my post?
The problem is - up until the PRISM reveal - people would probably believe what MS say regarding this matter. After finding out what they are doing regarding personal data and information with the NSA without our knowledge/consent, why should we believe them this time?
That's a trust thing. And nothing anybody at Microsoft can say can change that. We're right not to trust them at this point. I don't even think Albert implied, that they should have our trust back. The only thing that can and should gain our trust back are their actions. Lets see what happens from here on out.

Awww damn. That post of his has a very high likelihood of going viral. Goodluck at work tomorrow Albert. Hopefully you don't need it though.
 

Shosai

Banned
The problem is - up until the PRISM reveal - people would probably believe what MS say regarding this matter. After finding out what they are doing regarding personal data and information with the NSA without our knowledge/consent, why should we believe them this time?

Because it's technically impossible for the Xbox One to upload data in secret. There are enough tech enthusiasts out there monitoring the data going through their home routers to know when their console is mysteriously uploading huge packets when it shouldn't be. Something that obvious can't be hidden from the public for any length of time
 
Because it's technically impossible for the Xbox One to upload data in secret. There are enough tech enthusiasts out there monitoring the data going through their home routers to know when their console is mysteriously uploading huge packets when it shouldn't be. Something that obvious can't be hidden from the public for any length of time

Might upload the data at night or when Kinect knows people aren't around...
 

HariKari

Member
Because it's technically impossible for the Xbox One to upload data in secret. There are enough tech enthusiasts out there monitoring the data going through their home routers to know when their console is mysteriously uploading huge packets when it shouldn't be. Something that obvious can't be hidden from the public for any length of time

It doesn't need to be. It just needs to be something that can be turned on by an outside entity whenever they wish. Having millions of these devices that track local users is a wet dream for the NSA. They can hypothetically cross reference undesirables with Xbox user information and access the box in that person's house, for example.

The more likely scenario is that they simply bury the agreement somewhere in the ToS and do everything they can to get people to keep the Kinect plugged in. Big $$$ at stake.
 

killatopak

Gold Member
Because it's technically impossible for the Xbox One to upload data in secret. There are enough tech enthusiasts out there monitoring the data going through their home routers to know when their console is mysteriously uploading huge packets when it shouldn't be. Something that obvious can't be hidden from the public for any length of time

There was a post earlier that talks about this. It's not exactly large packets if it only contains boolean types of data. They could have questions asked like this. Is he smiling? True/False. That's 1 and 0 which is small. They would then have to list this question by order

1-1 (Is he smiling?-True)
2-0 (Did he finish the ad?-False)
3-1 (Did he visit the website-True)
etc
 
There was a post earlier that talks about this. It's not exactly large packets if it only contains boolean types of data. They could have questions asked like this. Is he smiling? True/False. That's 1 and 0 which is small. They would then have to list this question by order

1-1 (Is he smiling?-True)
2-0 (Did he finish the ad?-False)
3-1 (Did he visit the website-True)
etc

You mean Mortimer's post about the data being crunched locally?

That's entirely possible, but there are too many factors involved for it to be very effective in the long run.
 

FeiRR

Banned
You mean Mortimer's post about the data being crunched locally?
He may be referring to my post.

That's entirely possible, but there are too many factors involved for it to be very effective in the long run.
I'm curious: why? Voice recognition doesn't need much processing power. 10% of X1 (which is more than 100 GFLOPS) is far more than enough. There are even specialized chips which do that. Kinect could have something like that built-in and then there's SHAPE which is specialized too. Facial recognition (and recognizing your moods) needs more power but I'm sure again that 100 GFLOPS is enough. Kinect presentations even say that it's on the system side and devs are given API tools for that so it's outside the 90% available for games.

I know we're talking about possible future policy shifts now. I'd actually love to play a game which uses a camera to track my emotions and reacts to them. It's a pity Microsoft never decided to make such a game with the tools they have (Project Milo cancelled and all that). They see it more secure and profitable to release another shooter and use that tech for milking their customers instead of providing them with more value. I bet their research labs are full of great ideas but then they get buried by execs.
 
Might upload the data at night or when Kinect knows people aren't around...
wat?
Brilliant MS idea: Kinect will never get caught spying on you, after all, it knows when you're watching!

seriously though:
there is not going to be some kind of live streaming, that would get caught real fast
But simple boolean type information like killatopak mentioned are easy and (i guess) hard to spot. Same for other stuff like which persons are in a room together etc
I hope MS starts to be more open about all this. Is there a list somewhere which "experiences" require kinect enabled?
 

foxbeldin

Member
I don't know if this was posted already, if this is legit, or in which thread i should post it, but, this seems to have been leaked from Gamestop Italy.

xbox_one_350425.jpg
 

killatopak

Gold Member
I don't know if this was posted already, if this is legit, or in which thread i should post it, but, this seems to have been leaked from Gamestop Italy.

xbox_one_350425.jpg

Wow. The console + 3 games with the same price? Now I would buy that. MS seems aggressive lately with the bundles and its good.
 
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