Swearing in an XBox One Skype call can lead to a 24 hour ban | Hacker News Reader

Swearing in an XBox One Skype call can lead to a 24 hour ban

neogaf.com

36 pointsrobin_reala26 comments

Story title is patently false by the way.

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/25/microsoft-confirms-that-exc...

Can't believe I'm linking to TechCrunch of all sites. Heh.

The funny part is that a lot of the games contain a lot of swearing. I wouldn't be surprised if people would get banned simply by uploading gameplay footage where a character swears, a thing they promote heavily.

Unless they try to recognize whether it's from the game or the speaker. But in that case it's kinda weird because why is it ok for a character in game to swear but person commentating it cannot swear? "Silly peasant, freedom of expression is for corporations".

On the other hand I'd love to see Sony respond to this with a similar video they made for sharing the games. Same actors, same smiles "This is how you can talk in your videos to those mtherfckers! PS4 - F*cking awesome!" (cencored due to lack of information about HN policy, kinda ironic isn't it?)

> "Excessive profanity as well as other Code of Conduct violations will be enforced upon and..."

"violations will be enforced upon".. who? and really?

"Apparently, it's not just swearing during a skype call that results in a ban. Swearing during a video you record and upload can also result in a ban. It apparently gives you a 24 hour ban." [1]

It's not as if the Xbox One had a bad reputation already...

Why is MS on such a PR train wreck? Honest question, from my perspective they've been shooting themselves in the foot several times already (remember the 24hr connection/buy a 360 debacle?)

[1] http://forums.xbox.com/xbox_forums/xbox_support/xbox_one_sup...

Because people love complaining about Microsoft. So even when there is absolutely no evidence that this is actually true and the claim is quickly denied by MS [1], people still believe rumors like these and vote them up.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/25/microsoft-confirms-that-exc...

The PR train wreck is but a symptom of Microsoft's own culture of control and bullying. Fix that first, and there should be a lot fewer "PR scandals" related to Microsoft. But I'm not seeing Microsoft fixing any of that anytime soon. In fact, they've been doubling down on it lately.

I'm also surprised the Windows 8.1 integration with Bing that analyzes your local files hasn't erupted into another PR scandal that is at least as big as the one Canonical went through - this being actually worse, since Canonical doesn't analyze your local files to show you ads as far as I know, and more like LG's scanning of USB keys in their own latest spying scandal.

The article states this was a private Skype call. That's quite important.

If Microsoft bans swearing in public, it's fine by me. Actually, it's probably a good thing, Xbox Live chat is terrible and could do with a cleanup.

However, It's my right to say what I want to my friends in private. I swear a lot when I'm on Skype calls. Probably too much, but that's not Microsoft's call to enforce. No pun intended.

Here is an extract from MS' statement regarding this:

"To be clear, the Xbox Live Policy & Enforcement team does not monitor direct peer-to-peer communications like Skype chats and calls. "

I thought free speech prevented to do this kind of censoring in public discourse?

Why did you think that?

Somebody explain to me, how this (even if limited to public calls) isn't much more intrusive than Gmail "reading" your mail. Makes Microsoft's whole http://www.scroogled.com/ campaign look pretty hypocritical.

Because you shouldn't be swearing in the first place -- it's obviously not creepy if what you're doing is goddamn wrong!

Where's the evidence that it was swearing during a Skype call and not some prior behaviour that was reviewed by some moderator and coincidentally banned around the time he swore on Skype?

Yeah that looks suspicious, if Microsoft did that they would be admitting that they actively monitor Skype calls (or worse, spy on you with the kinect). That would be terrible PR.

If you dig through the referenced links, there are a lot of other users complaining about the same thing - admittedly, all of which could be guilty of some other bad behaviour, but y'know... One player also reports uploading a video in which a game character from BF4 was swearing, and that it resulted in them seeing this.

That's great, let's hope they ban violence in uploaded game clips too ;)

Brilliant. Wasn't it also promoted as the perfect device for small business owners to do videochats with? I bet they'll all flock to this now that you are guaranteed to have a civil conversation, "or else"

>i'm starting to get scared of this gen.

This comment actually got me thinking. What kinds of things will be possible in 1 or 2 more generations? When microphones (and cameras) are everywhere, internet-connected devices are ubiquitous, speech recognition isn't just better by then, but so is AI good enough to understand it and analyze it (to some limited extent.)

I have no idea what this means or what it could be used for but it's somewhat disturbing to me.

I'd take this with a pinch of salt. Can someone with an XB1 try and reproduce this?

With all this revelations around Xbox One i cant buy one even if i wanted to and i currently own a Xbox 360. My privacy concerns are to high.

And my personal list of companies i don`t want to by electronic devices from just grows by the day. Just added LG to the list two days ago...

Although this appears to be rubbish, I'd love to see something like this in-game or at least an option to play against people who just aren't nasty.

If you've ever played on XBox Live, you'll get what I mean. It's basically 12 year olds calling each other wonderful things such as c###s, f##s and n#####s [1] like it's a YouTube comment thread. It's appauling and totally ruins the experience for everyone else. They only do it as well because they know they are mostly anonymous.

[1] censored as I reckon I'd be hellbanned and then have to create another account, not becaue I wouldn't post them here.

Title is misleading, the story shouldn't be on HN.

Swearing in private calls doesn't lead to a ban. What does is uploading videos with profanity in it. This is Microsofts right to do. It would probably be better to age gate content considering the profanity in video games but whatever. Microsoft want to create a family friendly video site of people playing games.

The only complaint that can be made is that presumably there is no warning before you upload the video.

"You are fined 2 credits for violation of the verbal morality standards".

Banning based on voice recognition? What could possibly go wrong...

Don't Xbox Live Gold your customers Microsoft. Also, please refrain from creating new verbs.

I can't Xbox Live Gold is required. Because of my past behavior.

Because XBox!

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