I bet Bitcoin would help with that.
There, we've officially talked about both the NSA and Bitcoin in the discussion of this article, fulfilling the New Requirements for Every Single Thing Submitted To Hacker News.
Can we get another thread that talks about the actual article voted to the top now?
Citizens concerned about government officials overstepping constitutional bounds and lying about it, but not particularly concerned about the practical consequences of the surveillance.
Activists for whom NSA surveillance confirms that government is not on the side of the people, but whose sense of history leads them to the conclusion that if massive FBI files, Jim Crow laws, and lynching did not stop the Civil Rights movement, metadata is unlikely to prevent the arc of history bending towards justice.
“Airbus nationalists” in Europe who are, in their heart, more concerned about the fact the EU seems to be incapable of developing a Facebook, Google, Twitter, ect. They may ape the language of their fellow citizens whose privacy concerns are based on Nazi/Stasi/etc. historical experience, but actually view cloud computing as industrial policy struggle. Video game manufacture is likely not their strategic priority.
People with specific consequentialist privacy concerns. For example, someone who hates Facebook because it has caused something embarrassing to be shared without their truly informed consent. They may be indifferent to the notion that embarrassing information is hidden on a government database, and they may actually welcome and value that Google algorithms leverage their g-mail and search history to serve up more relevant ads.
People who once cared, but are so sick of monomaniacs hijacking every HN discussion that they are looking forward to buying an Xbox One simply as a sign of contempt. They likely also once were vaguely sympathetic to Google Reader users, but now see the product discontinuation as just punishment of tiresome and entitled whiners.
You may feel that all of these types of people are wrongheaded, but change often happens because large groups of loosely affiliated people band together, and rarely because zealots double down and fail to see why anyone might consider a different point of view.
http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/xbox-one/get-the-facts
>Xbox One does not require a Kinect to be plugged in for the system to function.
You can supposedly control the use of your data according to the fact page also.
I'm still going to hold off for a few reasons. The first is the requirement for XBox Live Gold. It makes no sense to me why I have to pay $$$ to Microsoft in order to watch Netflix. My PS3 does quite fine without a subscription. I was a fan of the Halo franchise but after the "incidents" with Bungie (Halo shoot'em ups) and Ensemble (lesser known for Halo Wars, more known for Age of Empires), I feel bad supporting the franchise with my $$$.
I'm also getting old and have less time to play games on my consoles. My iPad used to get a lot of game-related usage until the games started becoming "free" and continuously bugged me for in-game coin purchases.
Maybe I am just out of touch.
I had the same issue with Halo. Ultimately, I'm not going to support the Xbox One due to likely surveillance. At least with the PS4 the camera isn't forced on you at purchase. Although the PS4 camera does seem to have similar features like facial recognition. I wonder whether that will encourage anything malicious.
PS+ doesn't seem to be required for Netflix and Amazon though.
I'd trust this to apply to Microsoft's contractual use of the data, but not to the NSA's expansive powers under current laws.
If I was concerned about surveillance, I wouldn't consider buying anything in the future, because sadly this is going to be the future. Google's Moto X is an always listening device and being a phone I am more likely to carry it around everywhere. Like it or not, the truth is that the average Joe doesn't care about surveillance, they care about convenience and since they make up the mass majority (not us techies), a company is far more willing to trade up privacy for it. The only way to fix it would be for the government to step in and put in some regulation.
Did you miss it? You can just say "...because surveillance". [1] :P
I often wonder about half the things running on my phone and since removing some might make it useless I leave it be (not my domain so probably simplified a lot).
I really fail to see how listening in all the time is for convenience though. If that 'feature' was disabled the device would still be just as convenient.
>By having this in your living room, you have a device that passively... monitors emotional states,
Has this ever been confirmed? I haven't seen it touted anywhere as a feature (possibilities are not features until they actually happen). Sounds like FUD to me.
http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=...
Claims 4,5,6, and 7 are particularly relevant:
4. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the indication of the user's reaction is identified from facial expressions of the user captured by an image capture device during the time period.
5. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the indication of the user's reaction is identified from user speech patterns captured by an audio capture device during the time period.
6. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, wherein the indication of the user's reaction is identified from gestures and body movements of the user captured by an image capture device during the time period.
7. The computer-implemented method of claim 1, further comprising storing the emotional state of the user in a database.
Tu quoque and that's not even close to true.
Edit: Why the downvotes?
This functionality will almost certainly be implemented given how effective it would be in locating young males.
In terms of mass surveillance, only very recently has facial recognition been built into phones and penetration is still low. It is also easier to detect because of limited connectivity and conspicuous bandwidth and battery usage. But yes it will become almost as easy to do it on phones in the near future.
Given what we now know about surveillance the claim that facial recognition and gait analysis on the Xbox One will be used in mass surveillance shouldn't be contentious.
It's an easy sell: "NSA/FBI: If we had such a system deployed during the Boston bombing we could have found the perpetrators in a matter of hours instead of days."
"POTUS: What about privacy concerns?"
"NSA/FBI: The biometric data is stored on the users machines, we only query the Xbox network for individual suspects and return high probability matches, it's not mass surveillance at all!"
Anyone with a computer and Wireshark.
And even if it is now, who says a 'security update' won't change that in the future?
Do we want to get into justifications about what could possibly be done with a technology and therefore refuse to use said technology? I've heard Kinect could identify the guns in your house and send the police automatically!
The data is encrypted.
This assumes that the information is not encrypted, for one.
> Do we want to get into justifications about what could possibly be done with a technology and therefore refuse to use said technology?
When it comes to security, yes, you must consider all vectors. See the two news stories below about cell phones doing similar things as far back as 2006.
It's about risk management. What's the potential harm, what's the likelihood of that harm, and what would be the impact if this were to be used maliciously? It sounds to me like people are rejecting this because a) Microsoft and b) rumors and speculation.
Most people just don't even think about it at all.
I carry an iPhone, but I'm under no illusions of their capabilities.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732399700...
>Kinect is also used for lots of little things throughout the Xbox One's user experience. Profiles support fast facial recognition for sign-in. Once a profile has a face associated with it, the console will sign that person in whenever they sit in front of the console — it even says hello. Controllers sync automatically based on who's holding them.
Not to mention that Microsoft has been working on techniques for reading the emotions of people in the room through body language in order to better serve up adds.
By having this in your living room, you have a device that passively builds facial profiles, monitors emotional states, and counts the number of people in the room. But people are paying to be spied on by Microsoft so that makes it OK, right? Even when the NSA goes to Micrsoft and says "give us access to your data".
But privacy doesn't play the latest Killzone or log you in with facial recognition or play blu-rays.
There's too many people in the valley that complain about surveillance and then do everything in their power to enable it in ways ever more omnipresent and pervasive.