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Old 05-28-2013, 01:39 PM   #293
Russic
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Join Date: Jun 2006
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TorqueDog View Post
So wait.

Playstation Eye, Xbox Live Vision, Kinect for Xbox 360... why did we not have this alarmist sort of reaction to having motion capture devices on our consoles before? Has there ever been a reported instance of a console being compromised by a remote attacker so as to gain access to the camera feed when the console was powered on?

I'm genuinely trying to understand what the big concern is here. We have cameras in our laptops, web cams on our desktop PCs, cameras on our cell-phones (front and back). A cell phone is always on and always connected (since most people don't actually power down their devices), doesn't the same risk apply to those devices? I'm sure it can't take too much work by a developer to create an application that could turn on a cell phone camera and begin photo/video capture when the screen is in standby mode.
My guess is that the big difference is that it's always on. I always have a camera pointed at my face when I'm at my laptop, but I can be reasonably sure that it isn't on until the little green light tells me it is. The new Kinect is literally on 100% of the time watching and listening to what you're doing. I suppose a device could be hacked to watch you all the time, but with Xbox One it's actually a feature.

I could understand why some people really aren't going to like that. If the data is being collected in any way things get a little dicey. Even if Microsoft doesn't have the ability to actually attain that data, the optics of it are quite a bit more scary than I think the majority of people are willing to accept.
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