'However, we're concerned about any reports of governments surreptitiously collecting private customer data. Microsoft told the New York Times that it had not heard about any attempt to use Kinect for spying, and said to the newspaper: There's no word as to whether such a Kinect program has gone into effect Microsoft, the maker of Xbox, faced a privacy backlash last year when details emerged that the camera bundled with its new console, the Xbox One, would be always-on by default. While the documents do not detail efforts as widescale as those against Yahoo users, one presentation discusses with interest the potential and capabilities of the Xbox 360's Kinect camera, saying it generated 'fairly normal webcam traffic' and was being evaluated as part of a wider program.ĭocuments previously revealed in the Guardian showed the NSA were exploring the video capabilities of game consoles for surveillance purposes.

However, what is clear is that the agency has been considering using Kinect's camera to spy on people.

Webcam information was fed into NSA's XKeyscore search tool, and NSA research was used to build the tool which identified Yahoo's webcam traffic.Īlso not clear is whether webcam images from other services, such as Google Hangouts and Skype, were part of the British spy agency's snooping. Optic Nerve was based on collecting information from GCHQ's huge network of internet cable taps, which was then processed and fed into systems provided by the NSA. It's not clear whether the images and information were shared with the NSA. In one six-month period in 2008 alone, the agency collected webcam imagery - including substantial quantities of sexually explicit communications - from more than 1.8 million Yahoo user accounts globally.

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