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Xbox One Summer Update Adds Cortana, Music and More (mashable.com)
The Xbox One is finally getting the anticipated Summer update. The update brings Cortana voice assistant to all Xbox One systems in the United States and UK. "With Cortana, gamers can expect more from voice commands on Xbox," the company wrote in a blog post. In addition, the update is also adding the ability to play background music while you're playing a game. Also, users will be able to set whatever language they want, no matter what country they are in. Mashable reports: Other summer update changes tweak the usability of the console's dashboard and sharing features. There are also a number of invisible changes that prepare the console for the Windows 10 Anniversary update. Launching on Aug. 2, the Anniversary Update carries a number of benefits for gamers, chief among them the launch of Microsoft's Xbox Play Anywhere program. Play Anywhere is Microsoft's version of cross-play, allowing Xbox One users to download and play the PC version of supported games on Windows 10 machines. The list of initially supported games is rather small and it only works if you bought the game digitally, but it's a significant step toward Microsoft's goal of joining the Xbox and Windows platforms under one development umbrella.
Except you can. In fact, you can't even use the feature without explicitly consenting for this information to be collected and sent to Microsoft, and even if you do this you can later disable it at any point, and then on top of that once it's disabled you can actually delete all collected data to date.
Of course, you could (and probably will) theorise they do it anyway, but given the amount of times they explicitly give the users choice and require consent they'd be slaughtered by the likes of the EU if they did that because they'd be explicitly lying to customers and breaking data protection law as a result. It just isn't worth billions of dollars of fines.
So yeah, unfortunately this isn't a good story to throw out the old Microsoft hatred in, because they've actually done a pretty good honest job of data collection in terms of this feature. If anything this is an example of good practice, requiring explicit opt-in, allowing any-time opt-out, and allowing subsequent deletion of stored data to date.