[/img]
Microsoft's Dennis Durkin voiced an interesting idea at an investment
summit last week -- the idea that the company's Kinect camera might
pass data to advertisers about the way you look, play and speak. "We
can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are," he
told investors, suggesting that the Kinect offered business
opportunities that weren't possible "in a controller-based world."
And over time that will help us be more targeted about what content
choices we present, what advertising we present, how we get better
feedback. And data about how many people are in a room when an
advertisement is shown, how many people are in a room when a game is
being played, how are those people engaged with the game? How are they
engaged with a sporting event? Are they standing up? Are they excited?
Are they wearing Seahawks jerseys?Needless to say, sharing this level
of photographic detail with advertisers presents some major privacy
concerns -- though it's nothing we haven't heard before -- but
moreover it's explicitly against the privacy policy Microsoft presents
Kinect users. "Third party partners use aggregated data to deliver
Kinect experiences (games or applications), to understand how
customers use their Kinect experiences, and to improve performance or
even to help plan new experiences," the Kinect Privacy and Online
Safety FAQ reads, but also "They are not permitted to use the
information for marketing purposes such as selling you games or
services, or for personalizing advertising" (bolding ours).
In an email to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft flatly denied that
the Kinect would do anything of the sort, whether via third-party
partners or otherwise. "Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE do not use any
information captured by Kinect for advertising targeting purposes,"
representatives wrote. Honestly, some of us at Engadget still think
targeted advertising is kind of neat, but we know how seriously you
take this stuff.
No comments:
Post a Comment