Interesting. I've been following this sort of stuff for some time and quite honestly, don't like it one bit. This...
Digital Trends offers that it's not much different from how Facebook serves its ads
is patently incorrect. There is a huge difference between 'cookie' based data mining and what is effectively the 'profiling' these motion capture devices facilitate. Facebook and other online 'tracking' system gather information about a 'digital' persona, it all make an assumption based on what you do and where you go, so the information belonging to a particular profile is either 'true/false' in the sense that all it wants to know is if that data is not spam and/or can be collated.
Kinect, and the other proposed consumer motion tracking devices we'll see hitting the market in the next couple of years, are not tracking 'persona's', they're tracking actual people, 'profiling' actual individuals, so data gathered under those circumstances has a different 'true/false' metric; data mining in that context isn't about formulating patters and assuming ownership in a demographic sense because it already 'knows' data is 'true' in that it 'belongs' to someone, it's not just data patterns.
I'm not sure I've explained that well but yes, I won't have any of this stuff in my house.
Oh and should we trust MS in their saying they "don't pass on data to third parties"? Heck no!