Carmack won’t be surprised if Kinect Camera gets hacked spied on

John Carmack, genius programmer at id Software talked a little bit about Microsoft’s challenges with the Xbox One at his Quakecon keynote speech. While he stated that many of the things people fear about the Xbox One are probably true, he also defended things like Kinect spying on you as something that it is inevitable.
Carmack talked about Microsoft’s recent woes with its used game and always online policies as well as recent backlash over the always listening and watching Kinect camera. Carmack stated paranoia around a living room camera watching constantly is most likely a “temporary” vision of how things are perceived with the concept.
He stated that everyone is scared that the government is going to gain backdoor access into everyone’s Kinect and watch what’s going on in your living room. He then said “well, yea that’s pretty much the situation,” with the audience eruptin”g in laughter.

Carmack talked about some of the incidents reported in the media about laptops cameras getting hacked remotely and turned on. Back in December, reports revealing that the cameras built into some of the Samsung TVs could be hacked had the media in a frenzy.
This negative publicity has caused Samsung to back away from pushing models with web cams built in as aggressively.  Carmack stated, “we will just get used to it” regarding having a camera always watch you. Carmack does have a good point in that advances in technology will happen eventually and even believes that there will be some sort of major scandal involving the Kinect in the future.
He gave an example paralleling it to the introduction of tracking GPS through cell phones. While having GPS capabilities in smartphones has allowed the government to have the ability to track you, most people view the tradeoff to be well worth it if it.
However, so far Microsoft has yet to really show how the Kinect will revolutionize things. Besides big brother gaining access to your Kinect camera remotely, there is also the threat of an external attack on our systems. 
Posted in Games, Hardware, Industry, Microsoft, PS3, PS4, Sony | 14 Comments » Read more from Mike Ferro
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