Microsoft Contractors Reportedly Listened to Xbox, Cortana Voice Commands

A new report has emerged which says that some contractors working for Microsoft have been able to listen to recordings captures from the unintentional use of Xbox consoles' voice commands. Certain commands are known to trigger the console family's voice-activated features where users can then issue more directions, but Vice says that it's learned from contractors that these devices sometimes started recording after voice commands were issued accidently. This news comes after previous reports of other audio recordings from the Microsoft-owned Skype also being listened to by contractors.

Vice's report on the Xbox audio recordings references discussions with these unnamed contractors who worked with Microsoft both during the time of the Xbox Kinect and later when the Cortana service was added to the consoles. These contractors would listen to the voice recordings with the goal of improving the products which allowed the audio to be captured.

One former contractor said most of the voices they heard were those belonging to children. Some of these commands included specific deminds like "Xbox give me all the games for free" or "Xbox download" followed by a game or DLC name, Vice's contractor source said. Commands telling certain characters in a game to perform actions were also heard.

A current contractor spoke about some of the audio captured when using an Xbox device which included the voice-activated Cortana feature. Similar to the Kinect, users would at times unintentionally activate the feature when playing games, sometimes telling Cortana something and sometimes just talking.

"Most of the Xbox related stuff I can recall doing was obviously unintentional activations with people telling Cortana 'No' as they were obviously in the middle of a game and doing normal game chat," the current contractor told Vice.

Microsoft announced back in July that it would be removing the Cortana feature from the Xbox One family of consoles.

When reached for comment by Vice, Microsoft said it "stopped reviewing any voice content taken through Xbox for product improvement purposes a number of months ago" because it felt there was no longer necessary to do so. The company added that it'll occasionally review voice recordings sent from user to user if the recordings are thought to violate terms of service and that Microsoft has "long been clear" on its collecting of voice data to improve these voice-powered features.

"We've recently updated our privacy statement to add greater clarity that people sometimes review this data as part of the product improvement process," Microsoft said. "We always get customer permission before collecting voice data, we take steps to de-identify voice snippets being reviewed to protect people's privacy, and we require that handling of this data be held to the highest privacy standards in the law. At the same time, we're actively working on additional steps we can take to give customers more transparency and more control over how their data is used to improve products."