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Microsoft Exec Says Xbox One Kinect Is Not Built For Advertising
MojoKid writes "Among the various SNAFUs and PR misfires related to the Xbox One release earlier this year, one item that had people upset was that Kinect would be used for advertising--or worse, that the Xbox One Kinect was actually designed with advertising in mind. The source was a UI designer who was expounding the capabilities of the Kinect and how it could be used to deliver interactive ads and used for native advertising. However, Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Penello threw cold water on much of it. 'First--nobody is working on that,' he said. 'We have a lot more interesting and pressing things to dedicate time towards.' He also stated that if Microsoft were to engage in something along those lines, users would definitely have control over it, meaning that Kinect would not be spying on you; you would have to engage with Kinect for anything to happen."
They would never lie to us.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It sees you when you're sleeping.
It knows when you're awake.
It knows if you've been bad or good.
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=84471421&postcount=1590
Albert Penello, MS Director of Product Planning wrote:
Albert, I'd definitely like to hear more about NUad as well.
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.
that was his emphasis, not mine.
so basically, everything he's saying could be wrong.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
No worries, the Kinect only needs to be connected and powered on for the system to function, you can "turn it off" (in software), and it won't do "anything" [that you can see]. Moreover, the XBone doesn't need an always-on internet connection, so even if it were watching your every move and listening to you 24/7, it wouldn't be uploading that information until the next time you connected. And even if it were secretly doing that, Microsoft wouldn't be sharing that data with the government unless legally required to. And even if we were sharing the data voluntarily through a well-documented Prism access tunnel, you have nothing to worry about unless you are a terrorist. And you're not a terrorist, are you?
The first time I saw a screen-shot of Windows 8, I couldn't help but feel like the tile-oriented format was designed to shoehorn advertisements into the user interface. For a long time Microsoft relied on large-scale OEM business contracts to make money, and now that more price-efficient alternatives are available for office software and operating systems, they're approaching the opposite extreme of monthly subscriptions and integrated advertisement. They built these elements into XBox Live first, correctly assuming that gamers would be willing to put up with it so long as decent titles appeared on MS consoles. Remember when they first announced the original XBox? All of the concerns and criticisms that I had then(too proprietary, not enough 3rd party support, deference to the loyal customer base) have emerged again, but they lack the air-tight PC-gaming community dominance that they possessed circa 2001. For a long time, they had an array of products that was good enough to keep users from leaving; recently, they've made a series of products (Zune, XBox 1, Surface 1/2, Windows 8, Windows Smartphones) that are far enough from what consumers, and more importantly, loyal customers want, that they are approaching a catastrophic lack of interest. As much I would love to relish the downfall of the M$ of yore, I wish they would behave more like a competitor to Apple and start putting out products that just work again; they really had home-runs when it came to Windows XP and Windows 7, and I don't understand why they abandoned what was working so well for them.