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Comment by HelloMcFly | Hacker News Reader

> Looks like they're still going to struggle with the Kinect privacy concerns

I can't help but wonder. Of all of the issues with the XB1, that one seems like my candidate for biggest disconnect between what people say online and what popular perception actually is. I know I don't care, nor do any of my gamer friends, nor my brother.

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Do you own an iPad or a laptop with a web cam and microphone?

iPads and laptops aren't sitting there, listening to everything you say, waiting for you to say 'xbox, on!'. It listens to everything you say while waiting for that one command (like Glass, too). It'd be easy to give someone a hook for that audio stream, given the right motivations.

"Always on" is a price I'm willing to pay for fully voice-controlled functionality. If someone looks at the power usage and network activity of the XB1/Kinect and determines there is something untoward then that will give me pause, but at the present I'm not going to run from the technology because I think Microsoft is trying to record all of my actions.

Not with one that's active 100% of the time.

Which may not be completely accurate, the XB1 mic is on all the time by default, but I'm not sure about the camera. The benefit of my laptop webcam though is the hardware light built in to indicate when it's active.

Some of those hardware lights can actually be controlled from software, unfortunately.

I'm guessing your brother is little, not big ;-)

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