Microsoft has announced a new summer update for the Xbox One console, which will include support for the company’s digital personal assistant, Cortana, and will more closely align the console with Windows 10 PCs. A more unified online store will offer both PC and console titles, and Xbox One will also be able to support some Windows apps.
Microsoft is calling the Xbox One version of Cortana a “personal gaming assistant”. As on PC and smartphone, she is able to learn your current whereabouts and where your key locations are, so you’ll be able to ask it, while you’re playing a game at home, how long it’ll take you to get to work. Any information you request from Cortana will be displayed in a panel at the side of the main game screen.
To communicate, players simply have to say “hey Cortana” – a sentence that Microsoft claims is easier for the system to pick up than the old “Xbox” prompt. Players won’t need Kinect, as any Xbox One headset with a microphone will suffice. Players will also be able to ask Cortana what their friends are doing onXbox, and it’s possible to invite friends into a Party chat via Cortana voice controls.
Remember when Microsoft first announced the XBox One? It was going to come bundled with Kinect, which was going to be on all the time, would be constantly connected to the internet, and would constantly monitor the environment for any sound or motion that it could interpret as a command prompt. And people lost their shit:
Prior to Xbox One's launch, privacy concerns were raised over the new Kinect; critics showed concerns the device could be used for surveillance, stemming from the originally announced requirements that Xbox One's Kinect be plugged in at all times, plus the initial always-on DRM system that required the console to be connected to the internet to ensure continued functionality. Privacy advocates contended that the increased amount of data which could be collected with the new Kinect (such as a person's eye movements, heart rate, and mood) could be used for targeted advertising.
Reports also surfaced regarding recent Microsoft patents involving Kinect, such as a DRM system based on detecting the number of viewers in a room, and tracking viewing habits by awarding achievements for watching television programs and advertising. While Microsoft stated that its privacy policy "prohibit[s] the collection, storage, or use of Kinect data for the purpose of advertising", critics did not rule out the possibility that these policies could be changed prior to the release of the console.
Concerns were also raised that the device could also record conversations, as its microphone remains active at all times.So, fast forward to 2016, and Microsoft are now replicating one of the most unwelcome and problematic features of its XBox One platform, using Windows 10's Cortana, which is also causing privacy concerns:
In order to work, Cortana logs your voice (to process what you’re saying), location (to give you location-specific answers), your writing (to answer questions), your contacts (so you can reference them), calendar events (so it can create, delete, or give information about your upcoming appointments), and more. That’s a lot of stuff!
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This, coupled with the “Send Microsoft info about how I write” setting mentioned earlier, is the biggest privacy concern in Windows 10, primarily because the language is so vague. The “Getting to Know You” setting does not specify where or when it can collect, say, “typing history”, which is troubling.What could possibly go wrong? It's not like Cortana is locked to Bing, and uses a web service to perform all searches, even searches of your local files... except, of course, that Cortana does exactly that.
It remains to be seen if this causes the same kind of crapstorm among XBOne customers that GWX is causing among Win7 PC users. Gamers, generally, appear to more accepting of Win10 and its crap, and console gamers, in particular, might not be sufficiently well-informed to know about the potential problems here. No idea if Spybot Anti-Beacon will work on XBOnes, either.