"Hello Barbie" Listens To Children Via Cloud

jones_supa writes For a long time we have had toys that talk back to their owners, but a new "smart" Barbie doll's eavesdropping and data-gathering functions have privacy advocates crying foul. Toymaker Mattel bills Hello Barbie as the world's first "interactive doll" due to its ability to record children's playtime conversations and respond to them, once the audio is transmitted over WiFi to a cloud server. In a demo video, a Mattel presenter at the 2015 Toy Fair in New York says the new doll fulfills the top request that Mattel receives from girls: to have a two-way dialogue. "They want to have a conversation with Barbie," she said, adding that the new toy will be "the very first fashion doll that has continuous learning, so that she can have a unique relationship with each girl." Susan Linn, the executive director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, has written a statement in which she says how the product is seriously creepy and creates a host of dangers for children and families. She asks people to join her in a petition under the proposal of Mattel discontinuing the toy.

Comments

Should A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer....

[Art Popp]

...be a book or a doll? In an age where Internet is thick on the ground, no contest.

So, will a weak-AI owned by a for-profit company inspire little girls to have this conversation:

"Mom! The Raspberry Pi 2 is out! It's got four ARM7 cores! My 3D printer would print a pair of ruby slippers in under an HOUR! Please!"

            or this one?

"Mom! If I want to be a size zero, I need Kellog's Brand Nutrigrain Bars!"

Re:Should A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer....

[kheldan]

We should be so lucky as to live in a world where something like the YLIP really existed, even with all the conflict and problems in The Diamond Age.. but we don't live in that world. We live in a world where it would just blather on about nonsense, meanwhile everything the little girls say will be analyzed by market researchers for better ways to profit from them, and likely have Barbie say things to indoctrinate little girls into being 'better consumers' (read as: PESTER MOM AND DAD TO BUY YOU MORE STUFF) and for all we know brainwash them into being who-knows-what. Then there's the possibility of someone hacking into them and making Barbie say obscene things or things intended to mislead little girls into doing something horribly, horribly wrong, or who knows what. The hell with shit like this, make it go away. It's not the technology that's bad, it's the fact that you can't trust corporations or anyone else with it these days. In fact let's get rid of Barbie entirely, it's a shitty concept that's at the root of all sort of malodorous crap concerning little girls and their development anyway.

commercials and young kids

[jbolden]

I remember when my daughter was about 2.5-4 commercials were unbelievable effective. Even those commercials that targeted the mother watching with the kid had an impact and my daughter would often get upset we didn't have the right products. I'd love to just see a ban on advertising for kids under 10, and public financing.

Re: Hello, Talky Tina

[Skidborg]

Funny how "positive" in this case seems to mean simply "more like me".

Re:WE ARE SLASHDOT

[anagama]

This is marked funny, but think about it for a minute. Our computers, phones, tablets -- even watches -- are collecting way more information than this Barbie is and yet how many people think these ubiquitous machines are creepy? Not many. The lesson here might be this: the shape of the surveillance device doesn't make it creepy -- what it collects is what makes it creepy. Oddly though, very few people are creeped out by their own phone.

Two conclusions based on "shape irrelevant":

1) Barbie, phones, computers etc. etc. have become extremely creepy surveillance devices (this is where I am, which is depressing, because I've loved technology for so long).

2) Barbie, phones, computers etc. etc. are surveillance devices and surveillance is totally not creepy -- just don't care.

To mix and match 1 & 2 though, making barbie creepy and siri not, is inconsistent and illogical.