CardinalPiggles said:
Thanks for the correction, I'm terribly uninformed when it comes to computer terminology. But still (while trying very hard not to sound like a MS advocate) It's not like this information is light of something sinister from MS, most companies track this kind of stuff.
Yes, most do, which makes matters worse. Only data that isn't stored can't be abused. And we've seen how much the companies care for the security of our data (again, this is without touching the subject of the likes of NSA et al.), which is: not at all. Amazon, eBay, Sony, Gawker, they have all been hacked at one or more points, and most often not by highly trained professionals, but by script kiddies. Data security costs money and doesn't bring any monetary benefit to said companies. To make a device mandatory which is for all intents and purposes a sophisticated audio and video bug is highly dumb, if not suspicious. And once more: I don't belive (for now) that MS is actively gathering the raw data, but I'll be damned if they nailed their stuff shut enough that no one else can abuse it.
And as for metadata: There has been an experiment of a german politician who decided to look what only the cell change data from his mobile phone told about him. http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention <- give that a whirl. That is only data that the cell phone providers HAVE to track in order to provide their services. Now translate that to the kinect: With metadata alone y<ou can gather how much time on average a person is at home each day, on which days they're most likely to be at home, when their children are with them ("XBox, start netflix... watch Frozen!"), when they're most likely to be asleep ("XBox off" issued moon-fri no later than 1am for example) etc.
Now map that to other metadata gained from different sources (cell phones, facebook, whatsapp etc.) that you can access publicly or at least without much hassle, and you've got a pretty good image of a persons live and can foretell where they'll most likely be in a few days, too.
All of this without any NEED to gather the data. I mean, for what do they gather the data? For advertisements? Bad deal yor the user, I'd say. And once the script kiddies or someone else grabs the data, you're screwed...
tl;dr:
Data security is expensive and doesn't benefit the companies. "Other companies do it, too" makes it even worse. Metadata is more dangerous than most people think. And I don't trust any of those companies to keep the data secure, simply because they DEMONSTRATED that they can't (or can't be bothered to).
The only secure data is data that isn't there. Which is why the Kinect in itself was a mediocre idea, mandatory bundling and always-online were really BAD ideas.