Mattel’s new “Hello Barbie” might be more than just a beautiful toy that talks to children and there are opinions asking for the doll to be removed. These reactions to the talking doll, only makes us wonder: Is Hello Barbie a threat for children?
By pressing just one button, Barbie’s integrated microphone turns on and starts recording the voice of the child that is playing with her. After that, the recordings are being uploaded to a cloud server where the voice detection technology helps Barbie make sense of the information.
What’s the result? An analytical Barbie who remembers the name of your dog and opens the subject of your favourite hobbies in your next conversation.
However, the doll which has just been presented at the 2015 American International Toy Fair, has been asked to be removed by privacy activists. The children that are using Hello Barbie, are not just talking to a doll, but they are talking directly to the toy industry which is taking advantage of this to make more money, stated the director of Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood, Susan Linn.
The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, has started a petition against Mattel, and is worried about the fact that the toy makes children extremely vulnerable to the sneaky advertorial efforts of the mogul toy company.
In the demo presented by Mattel, the doll asks many questions that would be answered with a lot of information about a child, her family and her interests. All this information about the child, could be a great value to advertisers and could be used to be marketed immorally to children.
Even though, in 2013, Mattel’s toy sales have risen to $7.1 billion, its profits have been declining and the company is facing growing competition coming from the digital games and toys area.
To give Barbie her voice, Mattel, has made partners with ToyTalk, a startup based in San Francisco. ToyTalk has designed iPad games in which children have a conversation with digital animals, calls itself “an award winning” family and entertainment company that creates talking characters.
The CEO of ToyTalk, Oren Jacob, has insisted in saying that the toy will not use the audio recording of the child for marketing purposes and added that the information is never used for things related to marketing and publicity, or any other of these things. That is out of the question.
However, beyond the marketing purpose of a giant corporation having access to a kid’s inner thoughts, the voice recognising doll, brings many other concerns for privacy advocates, mainly because parents of the children can receive weekly emails containing audio files of the conversations the child has had with Hello Barbie.
Oren Jacob, has explained that this specific feature is created to ensure parents that they are in control of their family information all the time, Susan Linn believes that this added layer of transparency could mean trouble. According to her, children trust their toys a lot, and when they have a conversation with the dolls or the stuffed animals they are playing, they reveal a lot of information about themselves.
The voice recognition technology has become very reliable, and we have become comfortable with seeing this feature in our devices, from good humoured mobile assistant like Siri, to the new smart home gadget created by Amazon, called Amazon Echo.
But, the difference stands in the fact of an adult deliberately giving their information to a company, and a child is unconsciously playing with a data collecting doll. Another person, who has showed concerns regarding the Hello Barbie, is Golan Levin, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, whose study area are the new methods of interactive expression.
He admitted that, to him, this situation is creepy and that the difference between Siri and this Barbie, is that he is an adult who has given his consent about giving his information to Apple.
Mattel declared that they are “committed to safety and security”, and Hello Barbie follows the rules established by the government standards.
But with all these serious threats when it comes to online data, not everyone is convinced that is entirely true.
“They’re toy makers, not a cyber security company”. “Why don’t they talk to Sony about cyber security vulnerabilities?”, stated Levin.
Until its launch on the market, which has been planned for this fall, people will have plenty of time to decide whether they want or not to buy Hello Barbie, which will sell for $74.99.
Image Source: FAST COMPANY,CHIPCHICK
Deborah Campbell
