10 Crazy Facts You Just Have To Accept To Enjoy The Xbox One

4. All That Privacy Stuff

The biggest piece of news in the run up to the Xbox One wasn't any of its amazing features, the details of its mad hardware skills or exclusive launch titles. Microsoft had instead managed to tap into the zeitgeist in the worse way possible, by neatly dovetailing the Xbox with the then-current breaking news of the NSA's widespread surveillance of US citizens. We get wanting to jump aboard a gravy train that's going to ensure you get the widest press coverage possible but, well, this was not the way to do it. Thankfully when the console actually came out they managed to allay many fears people had had based on some pretty silly comments by Microsoft head honchos, which seemed to imply that the Kinect's camera would always be watching you, and could tell not only how many people were playing a game, but recognise their faces. That's some HAL 5000 crap right there, mixed with a little Person Of Interest and a liberal helping of 1984 sprinkled on top. You can see why people might not be crazy about their games console spying on them, even if it didn't go any further than the supposed usage of stopping you from playing borrowed or second hand games (which in itself was pretty crummy, before you even got to the implications of a major corporation having a camera permanently on in your living room and, presumably, recording your every move). They told us they'd changed these proposals from the original announcement when the Xbox One hit shelves, and we have to believe them. Because if not, we'd feel too self-conscious and have to give up the luxury of gaming in the nude, which we are not prepared to do.