Since Microsoft announced that the Kinect would be a central, packaged part of every Xbox One sold, some have expressed concern that Microsoft might use the device to gather information about players for marketing purposes. In recent days, the company has given slightly different responses to that concern, depending on which executive is speaking.

Last Thursday in a NeoGAF thread, Microsoft Director of Product Planning Albert Penello pushed back hard against the idea that Kinect would be collecting marketing data. Penello said he wasn't aware of any active work being done in that area, and he said that if such a feature was introduced, "You can be sure it wouldn't happen without the user having control over it. Period."

A couple of days later, Microsoft Corporate VP for Marketing and Strategy Yusuf Mehdi had a decidedly different focus in remarks he gave to the Association of National Advertisers' "Masters of Marketing" Conference. As Advertising Age reported, Mehdi's speech hinted at the potential for Microsoft to use data from Kinect and general Xbox One use for market research in the future.

"We are trying to bridge some of the world between online and offline," Mehdi said, according to the report. "That's a little bit of a holy grail in terms of how you understand the consumer in that 360 degrees of their life. We have a pretty unique position at Microsoft because of what we do with digital, as well as more and more with television because of Xbox. It's early days, but we're starting to put that together in more of a unifying way, and hopefully at some point we can start to offer that to advertisers broadly."

The two statements aren't necessarily in conflict; even if Microsoft isn't actively working on Kinect data collection, Mehdi and his team may have amorphous plans for such data sharing in the future. And even though a Kinect will be included in every Xbox One package, the camera no longer has to be connected to the system for the console to work, so users can easily opt out of any Kinect-based data collection just by declining to plug the device in.

Back in March, an Xbox Live advertising developer at Microsoft said in an interview that advertisers get a "slightly more limited set" of data from Kinect than game developers do, because "the company is very keen on protecting the user from any sort of abuse." Writing on NeoGAF, Penello referenced that interview as evidence that the Kinect could be used in targeted advertising, but not that it would be.