Attention all gamers. There’s something you may want to be aware of before you plug in that new Xbox One. Apparently, there are a lot of Big Brother features embedded into the system, so much so that that Germany’s privacy chief, Peter Schaar, is raising serious concerns. From Slate:
The complaint stems from the latest version of the motion-sensing Kinect technology. The Kinect device designed for the Xbox One can monitor users’ movements with a camera that sees in the dark, picks up voice commands with a microphone, and reads your heart rate using infrared cameras that track blood flow underneath the skin. Because the device is connected to the Internet, malicious hackers could potentially hijack the console and use it for spying. In addition, Microsoft has filed a patent that suggests it is interested in using Kinect to count the number of people in a room in order to charge each person for providing pay-per-user content. The patent outlines how a camera could be used with face and gesture recognition as part of a Kinect-style system to enforce “age and identity restrictions” on certain kinds of content, effectively granting copyright holders virtual access to private dwellings, as Wired described it.
Donate bitcoins: 35DBUbbAQHTqbDaAc5mAaN6BqwA2AxuE7G
Follow me on Twitter.
