Is Kinect spying on your living room and reporting what it sees to advertisers?

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Is Kinect spying on your living room and reporting what it sees to advertisers?

As if there aren’t already enough people paranoid about the wholly automated process of serving up ads in your email inbox based on your email and on Facebook based on your FB profile, now it appears that Kinect may be using what it sees in your living room to send information to advertisers on what kinds of ads to serve up.

Speaking at an investor’s conference on Thursday, a Microsoft executive offered that Kinect not only knows how many are in the room when an ad’s shown, but what kind of team colors they might be wearing. Uh-oh.

Privacy concerns with the Kinect aren’t a new subject, of course. At the BMO Capital Markets forum, Dennis Durkin, the chief operating officer of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment division, offered that if someone were watching a sporting event with Kinect on (for example, ESPN’s new streaming service to the Xbox 360), Kinect could deduce what team they support based on what kind of jersey or colors they wore, and serve advertising tailored to that.

It isn’t much different than how Facebook or Google serves up ads in that it’s done automatically and it’s not information that someone’s sitting there reading manually and jotting down for future reference, but it is a little creepier since there is actual camera data there of you, your friends and the inside of your house.

Microsoft has denied that they’re using the data for this purpose at this time, but the potential is there, and that’s still a little bit unnerving.

Via