Former Microsoft contract workers say that they frequently listened to recordings of people using Microsoft’s Kinect accessory for the Xbox video game console, according to a new report.
The practice, described in an article on Wednesday by tech news site Motherboard, raises new privacy concerns following a series of revelations in recent months about tech companies recording and listening to people using digital voice assistants.
The companies had been reviewing the recordings to improve the performance of voice recognition software. But since the news about the practice, Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook said they would suspend their reviews, while Microsoft said it would continue.
In the article about Kinect, which allowed users to control an Xbox with voice or gestures, one Microsoft contractor from 2014 to 2015 said that most of the recorded voices they reviewed were those of children. Age is an important factor because of laws that limit the kind of data that companies can collect about minors.
The Federal Trade Commission’s Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule, or COPPA, passed in 2013, makes it illegal to collect voice recordings of children who are 13 or younger. However, in 2017, the FTC issue an update, saying it would exempt recordings of children using their voices for actions like search because of the importance of handicapped people being able to use speech to control technology.
The exemption would seem to extend to Microsoft’s reviewing kids using their voices to control an Xbox. But that exemption didn’t exist during the some of period described by the Microsoft contractors.
Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment about its reviewing of audio from Kinect or how it handles data from users under 13.
In February, the FTC levied its largest-ever COPPA fine—$5.6 million—on the website Musical.ly, which has since morphed into TikTok, for collecting user data without verifying the age of those users. Such a fine would be financially insignificant to Microsoft, but the FTC has more recently settled a privacy case with Facebook for $5 billion.
Kinect debuted in 2013, and privacy watchdogs were immediately concerned about device’s Internet-connected microphone, which is always on. The Kinect was discontinued in Oct. 2017.
Privacy groups have raised similar concerns about voice-controlled digital assistants. In April, a news report disclosed that thousands of human transcribers had listened to recordings of people using Amazon’s Alexa. That was followed by similar revelations about rival voice assistants from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple.
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