Personal Data Protection activists urge Mattel to stop production of Hello Barbie doll, which sends recorded children's voices over the Internet for voice recognition analysis.
Hello Barbie doll is equipped with a small built-in computer, a microphone, a speaker and a Wi-Fi interface. When the belt buckle of the toy is depressed, Barbie asks a question, and records the answers of the children. These responses are encoded and sent encrypted over the Internet to Mattel servers, where they are processed by voice recognition software.
This software then sends back to the Hello Barbie doll a command to respond to child. Barbie is programmed with various questions, jokes and teases, which are collected by the digitizing software as answers.
This is supposed to convince children that Barbie is a lilliputi boyfriend.
Mattel and the San Francisco ToyTalk startup developed the Hello Barbie, which was first introduced at Toy Fair 2015 in New York last month. Since then, too many have expressed their concerns about privacy violations. Children's voice recordings are stored on remote computers to enable ToyTalk to obviously improve the voice recognition mechanism.
Today, however Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) begins to openly oppose it Hello Barbie, citing Registry publications.
The team is upset as the doll gathers the thoughts of a child, and stores them in Mattel's systems. This could be used for commercial and advertising purposes, the activists say.
"If I had a young child, I would be very concerned if my child's conversations were being recorded by the doll to be analyzed later," said Georgetown University Law School Professor Angela Campbell, who is also a school advisor to the Center on Privacy and Technology.
"At the Mattel show, Barbie asks a lot of questions that could reveal a lot of information about a child, and his family. This information could be of great value to advertisers. "
"Computer Algorithms can not replace - and should not displace - the subtle response of caring for people who interact with each other," said CCFC pediatrician and board member Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
"Children's well-being comes through the healthy development of the search for relationships through conversations with real people and friends. Children do not need Mattel's prepared commercial messages."
Of course the company denies the charges and supports them products of
All ToyTalk products on the market are designed to comply with or even exceed the Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). "They have also been independently audited and registered as KidSafe +," Oren Jacob, CEO of ToyTalk, told The Register.
"The underlying technology of our products works like Siri, Google Now, and Cortana, and ToyTalk products will never search the open Internet for answers. The answers are carefully crafted by our writing team, and the conversations recorded through our products will never be used for advertising.
Would you buy such a doll for your child?
