[chemgear]

Originally Posted by TorqueDog

^ What does that have to do with the Xbox One?

Not sure why The Verge would put together an article about it and have it as their top/lead one on their website today either. But they try to address the concerns that some potential customers have apparently. Fair reasonable read - at least to me.

http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/16/45...on-your-family

You close a laptop when you're not using it. Your phone faces the inside of a pocket, a purse, or lies flat on a table. But the Microsoft Kinect, an always-on camera that will come with every new Xbox One game console, gets a perfect view of your living room. It's always listening for voice commands, even when you turn the Xbox off. It can even read your heartbeat with the right software.

"We aren't using Kinect to snoop on anybody at all," said Microsoft's Phil Harrison.

But would Microsoft be willing to help the government snoop? That's a good question. Last week, a report in The Guardian alleged that Microsoft gave government agencies access to private Skype video and audio calls, perhaps even going so far as to integrate Skype into the NSA's controversial PRISM surveillance system.

Not unlike Kinect, Skype had assured its users that wiretaps were technically impossible. "Because of Skype's peer-to-peer architecture and encryption techniques, Skype would not be able to comply with such a request,"Skype had assured its users that wiretaps were technically impossible the company told CNET in 2008. And four years later, when hackers accused Skype owner Microsoft of changing the service's backend to facilitate government eavesdropping, the company categorically denied the accusations. Now, it seems like the company could have been lying, or at least had quietly changed its mind.

Scott Greenwood, a civil rights lawyer, agrees. "It would be a flat violation of what little remains of the Fourth Amendment if the government had the ability to spy on you inside your house via a game system to which it had a backdoor," he told us.

But neither Greenwood nor Patel seemed to think the idea was completely far-fetched. "What we don’t know is whether there are either secret executive orders or regulations that would permit this to happen," said Greenwood, referring to PRISM and other forms of secret data collection greenlit by the FISA court system.

That’s the fear of Christopher Soghoian, a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). After tweeting about how untrustworthy Microsoft appears in light of the PRISM allegations, he spoke to us briefly about his concerns.

Soghoian pointed out that there is indeed something of a legal precedent for law enforcement to co-opt consumer technology for surveillance purposes. In 2002, a federal appeals court ruled against the FBI for tapping into a microphone that was part of the emergency call and navigation system (a la OnStar) inside a person’s car. The interesting part is that though two of three judges ruled against the government’s wiretap, their reasoning was simply that it kept emergency calls from functioning properly. You couldn’t dial 911 if the FBI was already on the line, they argued. The 9th Circuit reasoning there was delicate ... it's not clear that the Kinect camera serves as critical a function. Conceivably, the NSA could quietly record what's going in your living room without disrupting your ability to play video games," Soghoian told us.

All in all, it seems unlikely that the Microsoft Kinect would become a spying tool, especially given the backlash if anyone ever found out. It sounds like it would be particularly difficult to justify wide PRISM-style surveillance, given the Kinect’s role in the home. But as devices begin to learn more and more about us, and as intelligence agencies rely on secrecy to block lawsuits that might reveal just how far they’ve gone, we might want to consider which companies we trust to stand up to the government when we invite these incredibly convenient new tools into our lives, and our homes.