UnnDunn said:
From the second link you posted:
Update: Microsoft has reached out to say that it has "strict policies in place that prohibit the collection, storage or use of Kinect data for the purpose of advertising." Additionally, the company and its advertising customers "are not collecting or using data obtained via the Kinect" according to a Microsoft spokesperson.
I'd say that's pretty emphatic.
The second link I posted is over a year old and regarding the kinect 1. I posted it to explain how Microsoft has been experimenting with kinect as a marketing tool to varying degrees of success. What you cannot currently find is that same statement regarding the Kinect 2 restricting the use of data for advertising. In fact, the link you personally cited below says the opposite. That it is gaining and using at least some data for advertising.
this article [http://sticktwiddlers.com/2013/06/28/xbox-one-dashboard-created-with-advertising-in-mind/], which includes statements from a Microsoft Advertising developer talking about how NUI ads are being developed for Xbox One:
?With the new Xbox One, the technology and Kinect has improved a lot,? commented the Technical Account Manager for Xbox LIVE Advertising, ?so that actually the voice recognition, the way you speak to your Xbox and the transition between gaming and watching TV is a lot smoother, and hopefully we can transpire that into advertising that we do.? Gamers have already expressed concerns over the Kinect being able to spy on them and their habits, but it?s not quite at that level of CIA-grade espionage.
The attending Xbox LIVE Advertising Developer commented that they don?t actually receive a lot of the biometric information collected by Kinect. ?This sort of works at two levels. There?s the game producers who have a different API, so a different set of code and system that they use, and they?ve got a lot more control of the whole thing,? he stated, ?whereas from the advertising point of view we have a slightly more limited set, which is designed to protect the user. The company is very keen on protecting the user from any sort of abuse so we can?t do certain things.?
What could transpire in the future though is something that we?re already seeing with a lot of facial recognition technology and personalised information being used to target advertisements. For example, Kinect could detect how many users are in the room and could serve advertisements aimed at families, groups, or individuals. Additional information from your Xbox LIVE account could also influence these by using metrics such as your gender, age, location, media habits and more, and Microsoft are very aware of the potential around this.
(Emphasis added).
First off, thanks for finding this link. It was this interview that I recalled reading and so set out to find and ultimately failed to uncover.
So we've got an Xbox Live Advertising Developer saying they don't receive a lot of biometric information. You can speculate on precisely which biometric data they do receive if you want, but to me it would seem more likely to be expression data--whether you're smiling, frowning, engaged or disengaged--while viewing an ad, not voice data collected during general usage. So I still say that your example of "talking about pizza then having a Dominos ad shoved in your face" is a gross misrepresentation.
Next, and this is important, not receiving a "lot" of biometric information actually indicates that they DO recieve some biometric information. This is an adertising developer. This is what we'd call a smoking gun. Advertising doesn't really require a lot of biometric data. It doesn't benefit from knowing if you're naked or pretty/handsome/ugly or whatever. It really benefits from three things. What you're saying, what you're consuming, and the composition of the audience (how many, age of the individuals, gender). By "consuming" I'm talking about as a consumer. So this includes furniture, light fixtures, the types of games you're playing and such. Knowing that will help understand what kind of things a person wants. If they're not using word recognition then they are at least using something else that the kinect 2 is monitoring to determine what ads they get. But come on, if they're going to use other data then they really ought to be using word recognition too.
Again, being able to tailor ads more efficiently can actually be a good thing. It means less crap we're not interested in and perhaps being informed of things we do care about instead. There will be a day when spam will cease to exist, not necessarily because of excellent filters or government legislation, but because spam will get smarter and get customized. Stuff that will understand an unmet need in addition to your tastes and spending capababilities and return a result that actually saves you research time. I've seen them trying to do this already by sending me emails based on my search terms. Unfortunately, the tech is new and dumb, so me looking up Penny Arcade translated into five or six months of emails about which penny stocks I should invest in because I accidentally clicked on penny stocks in the google search engine quick results. Bear in mind, that wasn't clicking on a site. That was clicking on a term to search and "bam", that day I got emails surrounding it.
This is just creepy because Microsoft is dancing around exactly what data gets obtained. Will my prancing around the house in the nude singing "I'm a barbie girl" (as a full-grown hairy male) get reviewed by a program designed to turn that into marketing data? I mean, I genuinely doubt anyone will actually be looking at the data. But what biometric data exactly are they getting? Age, number of individuals, gender, term use, race, race? Those wouldn't be a lot to ask and considering the range of nigh useless data (heart rate, eye dilation, hair color/type, number of fingers/teeth, etc), you can legitimately say you're not getting a ton of data when you're just gathering/collecting 10 biometrics. Thing is, 10 is a lot because 10 is all you need. Doesn't matter if there's 100 metrics except to justify the use of the sentence saying they don't collect a "LOT" of them.
What we're seeing is a complete shift from the Kinect 1's policy of no use of data for marketing towards outright use of it. Now that we know they do it, it's worse that we don't know what it's collecting. Perhaps I'd be ok with it? But I have also worked in marketing and understand what customized marketing can mean in a world that I'm getting marketed to anyways. Perhaps I'm being naive as a marketor. But I feel like many people would be a little more accepting of this if they knew exactly what data was sent (if it isn't crazy stuff that we don't want sent) and if they understood that they ARE going to get marketed to and this just makes that crap relevant. That's a direct benefit in which everyone wins when marketing is a given. If the ps4 avoids marketing like they did this past generation though, it'll be a tough sell. In any event, I'd like to be able to decide what metrics get passed along.
Interestingly enough, this article also discusses my least favorite part of the Live Dashboard and is probably the only reason I used my ps3 for media purposes. They embed the ads directly into the dashboard right while also cluttering the rest of the tab. I found the ps3's dash to be a lot cleaner, simpler. You never accidentally hover over an ad in the PS3 and get bombarded with ads. And yet the 360 is the one I had to pay to use their servers. That they actually use this to explain that they get 52% more clicks as something praiseworthy makes me cringe.
I'm not the only person who was unhappy with that update either: http://sticktwiddlers.com/2012/10/17/unhappy-xbox-gamers-find-out-how-to-block-dashboard-ads/
