What you need to know
- Microsoft contractors listened to audio captured by Xbox commands, according to a new report.
- One contractor described the Xbox audio they heard as "a bit of a welcome respite."
- The report comes after Microsoft confirmed that it uses humans to review snippets of Skype calls and Cortana commands.
Updated August 23, 2019: Updated with a statement from a Microsoft spokesperson.
Last week, Microsoft confirmed that it uses human contractors to review audio collected from Skype calls and Cortana commands to help improve the services alongside automated processing methods. According to a new report from Motherboard, you can now add Xbox consoles to that list as well.
Speaking with multiple anonymous sources, Motherboard reports that contractors were used to review audio snippets captured by Xbox consoles when users invoked commands with Kinect and, later, Cortana, some of which were captured by mistake. According to one contractor, however, the Xbox clips weren't as salacious as the phone sex calls described by contractors with Skype.
"Xbox commands came up first as a bit of an outlier and then became about half of what we did before becoming most of what we did," the contractor told Motherboard. "The Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly. It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands."
The contractor explained that most of the queries they would hear were from children, with queries amounting to things like "Xbox give me all the games for free." The contractors would also hear audio captured by users who accidentally initiated Xbox or Cortana commands, the report says.
In a statement to Motherboard, Microsoft said, "We've long been clear that we collect voice data to improve voice-enabled services and that this data is sometimes reviewed by vendors."Microsoft updated its privacy policies last week to clarify that audio snippets are sometimes reviewed by human contractors in addition to automated methods after news broke about contractors listening to pieces of Skype calls and Cortana interactions. But human involvement in these review processes, which are meant to help improve the services, wasn't clear to users before the updates to Microsoft's policies.
A Microsoft spokesperson clarified in a statement to Windows Central that the company has stopped reviewing most voice content from Xbox users for improving products.
We stopped reviewing any voice content taken through Xbox for product improvement purposes a number of months ago, as we no longer felt it was necessary, and we have no plans to re-start those reviews. We occasionally review a low volume of voice recordings sent from one Xbox user to another when there are reports that a recording violated our terms of service and we need to investigate. This is done to keep the Xbox community safe and is clearly stated in our Xbox terms of service.
If you want to delete audio recordings of your interactions with Microsoft services, the company offers an online tool to do so on your account privacy dashboard. Along with audio recordings, you can use the tool to delete browsing history and other data stored by Microsoft.
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