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Microsoft Integrating Xbox One Advertising With Kinect To Profile Users For Ads

Posted by Unknown on from the bleating-like-sheep dept.

MojoKid writes "When Microsoft reversed its Xbox One DRM policies a few weeks back, there was momentary hope that the company has listened to its customers and understood the features they were asking for. Granted, this was brief. However, with Mattrick gone, there was some hope that maybe the company would reintroduce plans like Family Sharing and put the console back on track. Apparently not. Microsoft's big new feature with Kinect? Advertising. Microsoft plans to use Kinect to make advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as it's playing to change the final outcome. The other way Microsoft wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft will likely learn that telling gamers that the Xbox One is an ad-centric experience and attempting to spin it like a positive doesn't actually work."

5 of 300 comments (clear)

  1. Evil. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Will not buy.

  2. Re:Bing, Bing, Bing! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Only old people use Bing. And only then because likely they confused it with Bingo.

  3. Xbox Telescreen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Microsoft's Skype, has a backdoor for the NSA to do stuff like live surveillance. This came out in the PRISM/CHESS documents.
    So your XBox with its dual Kinect cameras sitting on the TV, and its always-on connections to the Internet could well also have an NSA back door to it, like Skype does.

    Also from the Blackhat presentation, Skype is obfuscated code and may contain back doors beyond surveillance of calls, e.g. maybe they can turn mic/camera on remotely:
    https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf

    It's all very 1984 telescreen

  4. Re:It is better than buying used games by citizenr · · Score: 5, Informative

    This model seems to work on Steam and TODAY nobody is bad-mouthing Steam after over a decade of DRM-encumbered operation.

    Nobody in US where consumer protection means protecting corporations from users. Germany is suing Valve over steam no resale policy, they did it after landmark case versus Oracle that reinforced right to resale software..

    --
    Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
  5. Parent speaks the truth by Camael · · Score: 5, Informative

    Yup. MS said so themselves.

    Xbox One built for ads from the ground up

    So what about the future of advertising on the Xbox One? “It’s going to be an exciting transition though because the 360 console wasn’t built with advertising in mind, it was more of an afterthought, so we’ve had to adapt to the technology and how we work to fit them in to the console,” said Technical Account Manager for Xbox LIVE Advertising, “whereas this new one is going to have advertising in mind. So a lot of the limitations that we have now, hopefully the release of the boundaries will widened so the opportunities will be a lot greater.”