http://www.amazon.com/Post--3-Inches-Canary-Yellow-12-Pads/d...
Though there are a number of reasons I don't like the Xbox One, the Kinect isn't one of them.
Really though I think it'd be easier for them to just give customers the option not to plug it in, but my guess is that they're trying to make sure everyone uses the kinect that they ship with the console (its not necessarily being used for nefarious purposes), but with that being said I still don't trust Microsoft.
Really? What about mute people? Microsoft can't be that accessibility-impaired!
I guess the difference with this microphone is that it's listening to you all the time by default, and that creeps some people out. But it's not sending your words over the network, and is not more likely to start doing so than any of the aforementioned devices (actually, much less, because of increased security); it's just pattern matching for the word "Xbox". Kind of like the initial worries over Gmail "reading your email" to target ads: I predict that this too will peter out once people start actually using the product, albeit perhaps never die completely.
(For the record, the fact that Gmail messages can also be read by law enforcement under some circumstances is both a serious issue and irrelevant to the analogy.)
Not any speaker, but you can use some headphones as microphones very easily.
When it comes to teardowns you trust that multiple independent parties aren't all actively lying to you in concert.
I don't see how these are at all similar.
I won't reveal any secrets, but:
1) It should be very easy to determine if the Kinect is listening when it should not be, at least when the unit is off. So whatever MS claims the unit does should be verifiable.
2) I trust the Kinect team to do this right. They're dead serious about privacy issues.
You don't know me, so my trust in point #2 isn't necessarily transitive. But you should be able to look at signals and verify #1.
A switch that just twiddles a bit on an input line can be ignored by software.
A switch that controls power might be interesting. But then there's a cable from the camera to the console itself, which could carry some power, and might be used to run a microphone, or maybe the camera electronics, a little bit.
Really, your recourse is to unplug the camera. Or not have one.
Others have pointed out that there are microphones on laptops and tablets (that appear to be off, but who knows?), and many celebrated cases in which reverse-spyware has been used to recover stolen hardware.
This stuff is all around us now. There's no coordinated plan for NSA-like folks to glue it together, or light it up without us knowing, and I think this would be hard, at least for the time being, and doubly hard to do without someone noticing.
By contrast, there is no compelling reason the Kinect component(s) must be connected to the xbox when not in use.
I obviously don't know what sort of bus is being used internally, but if it were, for example, USB, then the mechanical switch could easily behave as the equivalent of removing a USB connector from a socket.
The laptop/microphone argument is a red herring. "Everybody else is doing it" is not a valid excuse for doing the wrong thing.
Don't get stuck in the mode of thinking you must design the solution to fit arbitrary requirements already decided upon. Those requirements aren't merely the source of the problem, they are the problem, and they're causing Microsoft to deliberately put its customers at risk.
Either way thats not the point, I don't have a webcam or mic plugged in, except when i am using it for video chat or gaming, and afterwards i unplug them. The xbox's cannot be removed like my PCs.
I'm completely building this into a paranoid delusion, but then this whole thread is a demonstration that we lack / are denied the knowledge to dispel paranoid delusions, and sometimes they're right.
m3mnoch.