Report claims that Kinect was part of a British surveillance program

Feb 28, 2014 14:52 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft is again involved in a surveillance program, this time outside the United States and apparently without any consent from the company.

A report published by The Guardian today claims that the British spy agency GCHQ put together a new surveillance program called Optic Nerve that involved several popular technologies, including Yahoo webcams and even Microsoft’s very own Kinect system.

It appears that British intelligence agencies wanted to capture images of Internet users via the built-in cameras, but it’s not yet clear whether Kinect has indeed been used as part of the program or not.

The report does claim however that Kinect was at some point considered to be included in Optic Nerve, but it generated “fairly normal webcam traffic,” so nobody can tell for sure right now whether it was part of the surveillance program or not.

While there’s no evidence that the GCHQ indeed spied on gamers across the United Kingdom using one of the alleged technologies, Microsoft was quick to deny any possible involvement, saying it was not aware of such a program and such a report was actually concerning for both the company and its customers.

“Microsoft has never heard of this program,” a company spokesperson said.

“However, we're concerned about any reports of governments surreptitiously collecting private customer data. That's why in December we initiated a broad effort to expand encryption across our services and are advocating for legal reforms.”

Microsoft is one of the companies that have called for greater transparency from the US government, asking for permission to disclose more details on the requests it received from local authorities requiring access to user data.

In fact, the company has until now been involved in several spying scandals, some of which claimed that Redmond provided unlimited access to the NSA to servers holding user information, including names, IP addresses, and even conversations on Skype.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has always denied all accusations, explaining that it never provided the government with unconditioned access to its servers. Instead, the company did confirm that it collaborated with authorities whenever a federal judged legally asked it to do so, but no information was disclosed to the government without such a request.

German officials, on the other hand, have even been advised by local agencies to avoid using Windows 8 due to built-in backdoors that could help Microsoft spy on users and then hand data over to the US government and thus collect valuable information from the German authorities.