One of my major concerns about the Xbox One is this built-in Kinect camera that has the capacity to pick up audio and visual data. This might come off as paranoid, but what if this technology could be hacked or commandeered by individuals, or even governments? I'd like to pose a few hypothetical situations where this technology could be abused.

1. You are currently living in Russia . You're an anti-Putin dissident and the government wants to bug your apartment and monitor who you meet and who you talk to. They've got the setup right in your living room, all they need to do is bully Microsoft into allowing Russian intelligence services to spy on you via Kinect. Microsoft caves instantly to the pressure and sells you out.

2. You're an up and coming actor on British television. You've come out to close friends and family, but not to the general public. You feel it actually might harm your career at this stage and you want to keep your private life private. You and your partner have sex in the same room where you keep your Kinect. In a week, you're hounded by the British tabloids who now have pictures of you in a compromising position. Unknown to you, The Daily Mirror has actually paid a private investigator to illegally hack your Kinect camera and "leak" the photographs to the tabloid.

3. You've been a naturalized US Citizen for some years now, but you still keep in touch with your friends and family in Yemen via Skype on your XBox One. You still worship at a local mosque near your neighborhood. Your friends in Yemen are outraged over drone attacks and are highly critical of US foreign policy in the Middle-East. One of your friend's name comes up in a CIA terrorism investigation and they start monitoring his internet activities. They take interest into your communications and use your XBox One Skype calls as justification for the FBI to start investigating you. FBI agents start following you to your local mosque and start taking pictures of people you associate with outside the building.

I'm not against the Kinect as a whole, but there are serious privacy concerns that need to be addressed before XBox One hits store shelves. If a few hackers can compromise thousands of credit card numbers and user accounts on Playstation Network, imagine what could be done with a device like Kinect?

Unless I suddenly become fucking batshit insane I will never buy a Xbone. But if I do I gaurentee I will constantly keep it covered up so that it can't see or hear me.

I have the same concerns as you. I think privacy is really important and these issues should be addressed up-front in a completely thorough way before Microsoft is even allowed to sell the new Kinect. But people care more about sexy technology than boring civil liberty issues, so that won't happen. And most people won't be affected by privacy violations in a way that they'll be aware of, so it's even easier not to think about it.

It's a real societal problem - people want shiny new gadgets with new features, but smarter, more pervasive technology means more opportunity for abuse.

I heard if you wrap yourself in tin foil the Kinect can't see you.

What is anyone going to do with hundreds of hours of video of me masturbating? Worst case scenario; They put it all online and steal hits from my yuvutu account.

"But I have nothing to hide."

You could also just turn off your unit when it isn't being used.

A friend of mine was paranoid about her laptop camera when she first got it. Her simple and elegant solution? Put a Post-It note over it. There are rational reasons to be worried about the privacy concerns any new device creates. In the Kinect's case, the solutions to this are simple. Put something over the camera, and something else to muffle the mic.

@hanktherapper:

Stop making sense immediately. This is the INTERNET, sir!

But it has to check in every 24 hours.

They're gonna subsidize their game sales with "targeted-demographic marketing info", ie. how many doritos QR codes/logos the kinect2 picks up on in 20-25 y.o. college male dorm rooms. "Hey Dominoes, if you subsidize Halo 7 we'll show ads during load times, SPECIFICALLY to the most likely demographics, WHILE THEY'RE FACING THE SCREEN!!!1!" (cue marketing department collective orgasm).

Microsoft is going to see a LOT of dicks.

how can it check in if it's turned off? the 24 hours thing is just if you want to use the thing, afaik; it's not going to ban you if it can't check in for whatever reason.

black tape over kinect lens = problem solved

This might actually happen a few years down the line if the camera is powerful enough.

These would be some great plots for a new Deus Ex game.

I live in Michigan, am not an actor on the BBC, and don't have any friends who are Yemenian Jihadists. Plus I'm pretty sure that Microsoft will eventually grow tired of seeing my dong, so I think I'm safe.

Would you believe it, I just found a thread about the Kinect spying on you that went up about an hour before this one. I'm locking this as a duplicate and referring people here.