Microsoft today reported that they have sold 1 million Kinects! That’s great but recent comments made my Microsoft’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer Dennis Durkin have raised eyebrows and questions regarding how safe Kinect really is and what it was seeing beyond the player himself.
Last week Dennis Durkin, Microsoft’s chief operating officer and chief financial officer, was spotted saying Kinect’s capacities go beyond monitoring the living room in order to provide advertising data to Microsoft’s servers which in turn provide relevant ads on your console. This means Kinect can tell Microsoft how many people were in the room and when an advertisement was being shown how many left the room and so on. The list of what Kinect could do is huge if it was pushed.
Yesterday we had reported about a PhD studentfrom California who hacked into the Kinect and used it as a 3D Video camera using the recent Linux open source code. What other data that Microsoft might be recording using the Kinect is still unknown. Future updates and upgrades might increase Kinect’s sensitivity to be able to identify what you were snacking on or drinking and show relevant ads.
Microsoft however was quick to clarify. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft admitted that Kinect was not really big brother and that they were not spying on you. They also said that the “Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE do not store or use any information captured by Kinect for advertising purposes. However Microsoft is not implementing any of these techniques just yet and Durkin came back saying that he was only suggesting and not implementing.