Microsoft Integrating Xbox One Advertising With Kinect To Profile Users For Ads 300
MojoKid writes "When Microsoft reversed its Xbox One DRM policies a few weeks back, there was momentary hope that the company has listened to its customers and understood the features they were asking for. Granted, this was brief. However, with Mattrick gone, there was some hope that maybe the company would reintroduce plans like Family Sharing and put the console back on track. Apparently not. Microsoft's big new feature with Kinect? Advertising. Microsoft plans to use Kinect to make advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as it's playing to change the final outcome. The other way Microsoft wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft will likely learn that telling gamers that the Xbox One is an ad-centric experience and attempting to spin it like a positive doesn't actually work."
Evil. (Score:5, Informative)
Will not buy.
Re:Bing, Bing, Bing! (Score:5, Informative)
Only old people use Bing. And only then because likely they confused it with Bingo.
Re: It is better than buying used games (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It is better than buying used games (Score:5, Informative)
> How often are people screwed by selling their used games for pennies on the dollar?
Umm its a used item, its not gold or an investment. I want to buy a used game as cheap as I can get it, that's all that matters. I think you're confused on the used marker thingy, its about buying second hand items "cheap" not selling them for 90% of the retail sticker price.
Xbox Telescreen (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft's Skype, has a backdoor for the NSA to do stuff like live surveillance. This came out in the PRISM/CHESS documents.
So your XBox with its dual Kinect cameras sitting on the TV, and its always-on connections to the Internet could well also have an NSA back door to it, like Skype does.
Also from the Blackhat presentation, Skype is obfuscated code and may contain back doors beyond surveillance of calls, e.g. maybe they can turn mic/camera on remotely:
https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf
It's all very 1984 telescreen
Re:It is better than buying used games (Score:5, Informative)
This model seems to work on Steam and TODAY nobody is bad-mouthing Steam after over a decade of DRM-encumbered operation.
Nobody in US where consumer protection means protecting corporations from users. Germany is suing Valve over steam no resale policy, they did it after landmark case versus Oracle that reinforced right to resale software..
Parent speaks the truth (Score:5, Informative)
Yup. MS said so themselves.
Xbox One built for ads from the ground up [sticktwiddlers.com]
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Evil. (Score:5, Informative)
His point was that you shouldn't pay for this garbage and then be presented with ads; that's absurd.
So whatever they can do, they will do if the market is OK with it.
And since most people seem to be morons, they'll end up doing pretty much everything.
Re:Great (Score:5, Informative)
Xbox One = NSA spy device (Score:2, Informative)
Let's get this straight, for those of you still too thick to understand what Microsoft is doing.
- the console refuses to function UNLESS the Kinect sensor system is fully operational
- attempts to cover the Kinect camera lenses or point Kinect at a wall cause the console to immediately pester the user to 'recalibrate' Kinect
- Microsoft insists that every app and game uses Kinect input to a certain degree, even if this means an optional input mechanism for menu screens. There are ZERO games and apps that will completely ignore Kinect functionality.
- Kinect sensors are operating ALL the time (no user disable, which is why you can NEVER use the console if Kinect is unplugged).
- The console dedicates 2 CPU cores (from 8), a significant chunk of dedicated hardware processing functionality on the GPU/DSP side, a significant amount of the RAM, and a large portion of the HDD for the exclusive use of the Kinect system. Not even a AAA game can access this set-aside hardware for its own use- Kinect is always able to run at full potential no matter what game is running.
- Kinect constantly monitors each person that enters (or leaves) the room, and stores a full face photo of each person. This data is uploaded to servers whenever the console connects to the Internet. Remote servers can use the full face photo, combined with the known address of the console, to make a hugely accurate informed 'guess' as to the identity of the person.
- The Xbox One can be remotely made to stream video and sound from Kinect (of programmable quality/bandwidth) by any authorised remote server. For instance, every online Xbox One appears on an NSA list, and NSA personnel can tell any of these consoles to begin (within tens of milliseconds) streaming Kinect data to their servers. Or put even simpler, every online Xbox One is a window into that home for the NSA.
- Xbox One consoles can be instructed to capture streamed data from the Kinect on the internal HDD for later uploading when Internet connection is restored.
- Lists of trigger conditions can be downloaded to any console- triggers that will automatically activate Kinect data gathering and streaming. Triggers might include a gunshot, certain people entering the room, people having sex in the room, a man speaking Arabic, sounds of a domestic disturbance, someone using the 'N'-word (look how that simple detail brought down a powerful woman recently- remember the usefulness of gathering potential 'blackmail' info).
So much attention was given to helping the NSA, that Microsoft forgot to bother making the console worth buying in the first place. It has 1/2 (as in 50%) of the GPU performance of Sony's PS4, yet costs more. Its GPU design needs special programming, unlike the clean GPU sub-system of the PS4 (this despite the fact that both consoles use the same AMD base graphics processing units).
Microsoft is pushing this ad crap to try to explain to VERY dumb sheep why the Kinect system is always-on. The really dumb sheep are supposed to be still unaware of the unbelievable extent of the NSA abuses. Even now, in gaming forums aimed at Xbox users, the consensus successful pushed by Microsoft reputation managers is that the NSA spying allegations have been disproved, but obviously when the rotten console finally goes on sale, and tests prove the Kinect is always running, some cover story will be needed to justify this.
Re:It is better than buying used games (Score:5, Informative)
I have no problem with Steam. They actually seem to realize that digital delivery means the customer can save money. When I'm buying fairly recent games for 60% off or whatever, I don't really care if I can't resell them. Steam makes purchasing and playing games pretty cheap and easy, so I like it.
Origin, is another story. Steam works precisely because it's publisher-agnostic. Origin will never gain that momentum because EA is just using it as a way to increase profits by cutting out the costs of physical distribution, without passing any savings to the customer.