Microsoft Xbox - and contractors working on behalf of the company - has been listening into gamers, a new report claims.
A number of contractors spoke to Motherboard to admit that they had listened to conversations recorded in people's homes without them knowing.
The audio system on Xbox One was supposed to kick in after gamers gave a specific voice command - such as 'Xbox' or 'Hey Cortana', but now contractors say the recordings were sometimes accidentally set off and recorded.
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Contractors working on behalf of Microsoft were then sent these recordings to listen to, in order to improve the products and services.
One contractor told Motherboard: "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."
Once started it would continue for some time, with the user unknowingly having their conversation recorded.
Another contractor told the news outlet it was 'mostly children' that were accidentally recorded, explaining: "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 Xbox stuff was actually a bit of a welcome respite, honestly. It was frequently the same games. Same DLCs. Same types of commands."
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Cortana has since been removed from Xbox - but can still control the console via a Cortana app on mobile, although Mircosoft has said it no longer 'reviews voice content' taken from Xbox.
In a statement to Gizmodo, a spokesperson from Microsoft said: "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."
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