revelation after revelation. We're about due for
one of our own. A Revelation to bring an end
to all this corruption.
US government admits that the NSA has been
following most phones and most social network
sites.
You think you can escape by playing video games?
think again.
The Xbox is the Spy in a Box that
the government has been dreaming of. It tracks
everything you do, up to the smell of your farts.
Checkit: Liberty Blitzkrieg
What’s in Your Xbox? A Lot of Surveillance
Capabilities
Attention all gamers. There’s something you
may want to be aware of before you plug in that new Xbox One. Apparently,
there are a lot of Big Brother features embedded into the system, so much so
that that Germany’s privacy chief, Peter Schaar, is raising serious
concerns. From Slate:
The complaint stems from the latest version of the
motion-sensing Kinect technology. The Kinect device designed for the Xbox One can
monitor users’ movements with a camera that sees in the dark, picks up voice
commands with a microphone, and reads your heart rate using infrared cameras
that track blood flow underneath the skin. Because the device is connected to
the Internet, malicious hackers could potentially hijack the console and use it
for spying. In addition, Microsoft has filed a patent that suggests it is interested in using Kinect to count the number
of people in a room in order to charge each person for providing pay-per-user
content. The patent outlines how a camera could be used with face and gesture
recognition as part of a Kinect-style system to enforce “age and identity
restrictions” on certain kinds of content, effectively granting copyright
holders virtual access to private dwellings, as Wired described it.
Microsoft has attempted to play down the privacy
fears, claiming that it is “a leader in the world of privacy” and adding that it
is not “using Kinect to snoop on anybody at all.” But this has not convinced
officials in Germany. In an interview published Sunday by Der Spiegel, the country’s federal data protection commissioner, Peter
Schaar, said he was unsettled by how the Xbox One “records all sorts of
personal information” that would be “processed on an external server” and
possibly passed on to third parties. “The fact that Microsoft is now spying on
my living room is just a twisted nightmare,” Schaar told the newspaper.
I guess we can’t even play video games in peace
anymore. Sad.
