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MicrosoftWith Kinect for Xbox 360, you are the controller. Easy to use and instantly fun, Kinect gets your whole body in the game. Imagine controlling movies and music with the wave of a hand or the sound of your voice. With Kinect, technology evaporates, letting the natural magic in all of us shine. And the best part is Kinect works with every Xbox 360.
With new technology and innovations like Kinect, there will be questions about how that technology works and exactly what that technology does. Families and parents, in particular, have questions about what safeguards are provided to help them manage their family’s entertainment experiences and protect their privacy and online safety. As leaders in the video game industry, Microsoft is proud to have led the effort to create and build in safety and privacy measures, and today virtually all of Microsoft's consumer products feature family-safety features, including Kinect.
This guide will help answer those questions and show you how with Xbox 360 Family settings, both for the console and Xbox Live, you are in control of what you and your children play, watch, browse, and share.
We also know that privacy is important to everyone, not just parents, and your privacy and ability to control what you share with others when using the Xbox Live service are of paramount importance to Microsoft. We take a holistic approach to privacy that starts with embedding privacy controls and safeguards in our products and services to help protect and manage information with greater confidence and safety. In addition to family-specific questions, we have provided a detailed set of questions and answers on what data is collected by the Kinect sensor and how it’s used.
Family safety is a very high priority for us, and there are several ways parents can help safeguard their child’s use of Xbox 360, Xbox Live, and Kinect. Xbox 360 and Xbox Live already provide parents with strong controls to manage their family’s gaming experiences, and we extend those controls to Kinect.
The Xbox Live sign-in is how each member of your family signs in to use Xbox Live. Online Safety Settings only apply when you or your child is using Xbox Live. If a child is a minor, parental permission is required for the child to obtain an Xbox Live account, and the Online Safety Settings that you established during account creation are applied every time your child signs in to the service.
For more information on choosing and setting the right parental controls for your family, sign in to account.xbox.com/Settings/Home.
Your privacy, and your ability to control what you and your family share with others when using the Xbox Live service, are of paramount importance to Microsoft. Please read the Microsoft Privacy Statement to learn more about the types of data we collect, why and how we collect them, and what controls we provide so that you can protect your family’s privacy.
You can turn the Kinect sensor OFF by going to System Settings > Kinect Settings and choosing to turn the sensor OFF. The Kinect sensor hardware does not have a physical OFF switch. Alternatively, you can always unplug the Kinect sensor from the console when it’s not in use. When using the Kinect Settings to turn the sensor OFF, all processors on the device that are used to stream audio, video, or depth data to the console are in fact turned OFF.
The green light on the Kinect sensor will be on when it’s active and off when deactivated.
Kinect does not collect information about you or your environment if you are not engaged in a Kinect experience (playing a Kinect game, using a Kinect-enabled application, or navigating the Xbox dashboard).
The data that we obtain when you use third-party Kinect experiences (games or applications) is used to deliver and even improve that experience. Largely, it is aggregated, anonymous data generated while customers are engaged in the experience—for example, the length of time that a particular game was played. Game publishers may also receive your gamertag so it can be displayed to you and your gaming partners as part of game play and on leaderboards.
Third-party partners use aggregated data to deliver Kinect experiences (games or applications), to understand how customers use their Kinect experiences and to improve performance or even to help plan new experiences. They are not permitted to use the information for marketing purposes, such as selling you games or services, or for personalizing advertising. Also, third-party partners are not allowed to collect player personal information without review and approval by Microsoft.
Data collected through use of Kinect is stored on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform for up to three months, after which it will be deleted. During that three-month period, the data will be held for analysis purposes. If chosen for analysis, the data will be rendered into an anonymous state before use.
Kinect ID provides you with the option of signing in to your gamer profile using facial recognition technology. To do so, the Kinect camera collects information about your facial features in different poses and light conditions and stores that information on your console’s hard drive. It does not store exact details about your face like the color of your eyes, hair, or skin. If you choose to use Kinect ID to sign in to your gamer profile, Kinect looks at your face, and if it recognizes you, you will be signed in to your profile. It also allows you to join a game in progress and be signed in automatically. Kinect ID data is stored as a very long set of numbers, which can’t be transformed into a picture of a person. No one could look at the numbers and know they represent you or a family member.
The Kinect sensor scans your body—we call it skeletal tracking—in order to facilitate game play. Skeletal tracking data is a representation of body joints—picture a stick figure—and cannot be used to personally identify you. This information that we call session data is held in temporary memory on the console and is only used to create the “stick figure” needed to track your movements. When you turn off your Xbox, the skeletal tracking information is deleted from temporary memory.
The Tuner is a system application that is launched from Kinect Guide/Kinect Hub/Regular Guide/In-Game Menu to diagnose and fix problems with Kinect. You can launch it anytime from the Kinect Guide, which means you don’t need to leave a Kinect experience in order to troubleshoot issues.
If your Kinect experience is paused due to a system issue, you will be prompted to use the Tuner, which is optional. It will attempt to provide resolution of the issue and will store information on the console about the current and previous Tuner troubleshooting attempts. Some of that information will be sent to Microsoft to be used to improve the Tuner and your future experience with it. This information includes the title of the game or application you were using, the angle of the Kinect camera, volume levels, player distance from Kinect, the Kinect serial number, and the Xbox console ID. For more information on Kinect troubleshooting visit support.xbox.com.
The Kinect sensor can take photos or videos of you when you are playing games, and in some cases, make those photographs and videos available for download, copying, or sharing onto social media sites through KinectShare.com.
In order to share photos with other sites using KinectShare.com you must log onto KinectShare.com and choose to share those photos with other social networking sites.
Additionally, there is a specific setting that controls whether those photographs and videos can be shared with others outside of Xbox Live. It is called Kinect Sharing and is a privacy setting found within the console. Kinect Sharing has two settings: Blocked and Allowed. For children under 13, the default setting is Blocked, while everyone else is set to Allowed. The setting can be changed by those with permission to do so.
In the Online Safety settings for your child’s Xbox Live profile, set Kinect Sharing to Blocked. Then, when your child is signed in and playing a game online, photographs and videos taken during gameplay cannot be shared outside Xbox Live.
Additionally, if the images or videos will be transferred outside of the console, they must tell you where they will be transferred and give you the ability to confirm or cancel transmission of the photos or videos prior to transmission. To prevent images from being shared outside of your console, set Kinect Sharing to Blocked.
If you set your child’s Kinect Sharing control to Blocked and the child is signed in and playing a game, the game will recognize your child’s Kinect Sharing control is set to Blocked and will not allow photographs to be shared outside the Xbox Live system.
If more than one person is signed in to the console for online play, and any player’s Kinect Sharing is set to Blocked, that setting will apply to everyone in that session. If, however, everyone playing a game on a specific console has their Kinect Share control set to Allowed, or if they are not logged in playing online, then photos and videos can be taken and shared in context of the game. Some games might show you an instant replay video and let you upload it, but it’s not saved on the console after gameplay. Some games might take photos and put them into a photo gallery in-game where you can select which to upload.
If a player’s Kinect Sharing is set to Allowed, the player can send photographs or videos to KinectShare.com. The player that uploaded the photos or videos must sign in to KinectShare.com with his or her Windows Live ID and can then decide to print the photographs, download them, or send them to social media sites like Facebook. A person’s KinectShare.com account is password protected with their Windows Live ID password and not accessible by any other users. Any photos or videos sent to KinectShare.com are automatically deleted after 14 days, though you can delete them earlier if you choose.
Video chat is one of the powerful features of Kinect. One or several people in one room can contact and chat with a person or group anywhere that Kinect-enabled applications using video chat are available. We are aware that such a service has powerful benefits but requires controls, so we made certain you control if video of you or your family is being broadcast and who can see that video. You will also be shown, through thumbnail video on your screen, what video of you is being broadcast during a video chat session.
You can also use the Accept Friends Request setting in your child’s Family Settings to require your approval before anyone is added to your child’s friend’s list. By using the Video Communications setting and the Accept Friends Request setting you can effectively limit your child’s video communications to only those people you approve.
Voice and text chat are protected in the same manner as video communication with the same level of control. The Voice and Text Family Setting can be set to Everyone, Friends Only, and Blocked. Microsoft sets the default for this, and other sharing controls, to Blocked for child accounts and Friends Only for teenagers.
When you speak certain commands, Kinect recognizes those commands in order to respond appropriately. Capturing voice samples is critical to helping us improve our speech recognition capabilities, which includes helping make Kinect better at responding to voice commands. If you give permission, samples of those speech commands can be sent to Microsoft to help improve speech recognition. You can turn on or turn off voice command collection at any time. If you turn off voice collection in the “privacy” section of your Family Settings, the stored voice recordings that have not been sent to Xbox will be deleted without being sent.
No. Kinect recognizes certain words you speak as a voice command to Kinect and uses those words to respond appropriately, but your speech isn’t sent back to Microsoft. The only time we store or send your spoken words is when you have granted us permission to collect and store key words for research purposes such as improving speech recognition. You can see the voice data collection setting in the “privacy” section of your Family Settings.
We are only interested in your voice commands to Xbox, which we capture along with any ambient background noise. If you give Microsoft permission, we record commands whether you are online or offline. If offline, your Xbox console will store the information until you connect to Xbox Live.
There are two voice control settings for Kinect. One turns the Kinect microphone on or off. This stops or allows use of the sensor microphone for chat while still allowing voice commands. The other turns speech recognition on or off, allowing you to disable speech recognition for voice commands while still allowing chat. Regardless of the Microsoft settings, gestures still work.