The Guardian reports that UK spy agency GCHQ previously evaluated using the Xbox 360's Kinect sensor for mass surveillance purposes.
According to newly published documents, the spy agency has already taken secret images through Mac and PC web-cams and considers the Kinect sensor to be equally useful for information gathering.
The files, dated 2008 to 2012, show that the GCHQ's surveillance program, codenamed Optic Nerve, collected images of internet users through Yahoo's webcam chat service.
It's unclear whether the GCHQ have actually captured images from Kinect on either Xbox 360 or Xbox One. The spy agency said Kinect produces "fairly normal webcam traffic."
In a statement to CVG, a Microsoft representative said that the company "has never heard of this program" but added, "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."
Yahoo also commented on the report saying, "we are not aware of, nor would we condone, this reported activity. This report, if true, represents a whole new level of violation of our users' privacy that is completely unacceptable, and we strongly call on the world's governments to reform surveillance law."
In a six month period in 2008, GCHQ captured 1.8 million images from Yahoo user webcams. Targeted cameras around the world would take snapshots every five minutes before sending them back to the spy agency. With the assistance of the NSA, GCHQ performed automatic facial recognition technology in the hope of finding terrorist targets and other people of interest.
Optic Nerve saved the bulk of images to its databases, regardless of whether individual users were an intelligence target or not.
