Microsoft contractors reveal they listened to Xbox players via Kinect

Ever since its very inception, people have been incredibly skeptical about Xbox One and the Kinect. When it launched in 2013, everyone who bought the console had to own a Kinect. When it was announced, it was even made to sound like the console would require it to be used but changes were made to ensure that you could just throw it in a box and never look at it ever again.

The camera and microphone allowed players to control their console via voice and motion controls but quickly died off. The skepticism came from players concerned that Microsoft or the government was using the device to spy on them within their homes. This was also hot off of the big NSA whistleblowing scandal, making people reasonably paranoid.

Turns out that yeah, that was kind of happening and Microsoft heard a lot of things you were saying to a degree. The Kinect would be triggered by specific phrases like saying “Xbox” and then issuing a command like “On” or “Play [insert game]”. The Kinect would also stay listening for a period after these commands.

Both past and present Microsoft contractors revealed this info to Motherboard under the condition of anonymity.

“Xbox commands came up first as a bit of an outlier and then became about half of what we did before becoming most of what we did,” said a former contractor regarding their work at the company.

“The Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly. It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands,” they added. “‘Xbox give me all the games for free’ or ‘Xbox download [newest Minecraft skins pack]’ or whatever.”

One contractor claimed that a lot of recordings came from the Kinect unintentionally being activated and then players trying to turn it off.

“Most of the Xbox related stuff I can recall doing was obviously unintentional activations with people telling Cortana ‘No’ as they were obviously in the middle of a game and doing normal game chat,” claimed a current contractor.

One Microsoft contractor also noted that they were told not to talk about what they were doing outside of work. All contractors were also required to sign non-disclosure agreements, a standard for this kind of work.

“I recall explicitly being told ‘you probably shouldn’t mention it was for Microsoft’ during the hiring process.”

In a statement to Motherboard, Microsoft clarified how they used the recordings and revealed they have since stopped monitoring them.

“We stopped reviewing any voice content taken through Xbox for product improvement purposes a number of months ago, as we no longer felt it was necessary, and we have no plans to re-start those reviews,” the spokesperson wrote. “We occasionally review a low volume of voice recordings sent from one Xbox user to another when there are reports that a recording violated our terms of service and we need to investigate. This is done to keep the Xbox community safe and is clearly stated in our Xbox terms of service.”

Microsoft also noted that these things are noted in their terms of service but it wasn’t until recently that it became noted that it was also monitored by humans. “Our processing of personal data for these purposes includes both automated and manual (human) methods of processing.”

“We always get customer permission before collecting voice data, we take steps to de-identify voice snippets being reviewed to protect people’s privacy, and we require that handling of this data be held to the highest privacy standards in the law. At the same time, we’re actively working on additional steps we can take to give customers more transparency and more control over how their data is used to improve products.”

The Kinect has been long dead with revisions of the console not even including a port to plug it in. Microsoft did adopt a Siri-type function on the console named Cortana that could be used in various ways but has also fallen to the wayside on the console side.