Your privacy concerns with Kinect were not foolish

People were monitoring Kinect. Recently, Apple, Google, Amazon, and Facebook had to admit that real live people sometimes listened in on the companys’ digital assistants. During that news cycle, Microsoft also admitted that they hired folks to monitor Skype and Cortana conversations, but Motherboard reports that contractors also listened to Kinect interactions. Their sources, ex-employees of the contracted company, say that while their monitoring was limited to audio only, children were frequently the subjects.

“The Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly. It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands.”

If you were one of the people that objected to Kinect because it was “creepy” and maybe invasive, well, congratulations! Being paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not listening. Microsoft has updated their general privacy policy to note that they use both “automated and manual (human)” methods of processing data.