Albert Penello, director of product planning at Microsoft, faces the task of clearing the air regarding the public’s misconception about Kinect’s new facial-recognition feature. He now has to clarify previous statements and assure gamers that their faces aren’t going anywhere.
Recent privacy concerns have arisen among gamers who fear that the Kinect’s new facial-recognition technology will collect data (including a detailed scan of gamers faces) that will be used in advertising ventures in the future, once its uploaded to the cloud. In a post on NeoGAF.com, Penello responds to one user (in hopes of clarifying things) by saying, “What I think you’re asking about is an interview done earlier in the year where someone was talking about how some of the new Xbox One Kinect features ‘could’ be used in advertising – since we can see expressions, engagement, etc. and how that might be used to target advertising. This is the point that seems to draw some controversy.”
This idea, coupled with the new NuAds technology that will provide interactive advertisings on the console, is what led to concerns that the two would be working in tandem.
In the post, he also goes on to talk about an interesting concept for the future, where once you’ve uploaded your data to the cloud (facial and otherwise), it can easily be pulled down to a friend’s consoles at a different location, allowing you to log in and have access to your own data remotely.
Source: NeoGAF