As I wrote recently after Mattel announced it was teaming up with ToyTalk to introduce a nearly all-knowing and fully-throated Barbie, the talking-toy trend continues unabated, with more and more toy-makers giving digital voice to their creations.
Well, that unabated trend just hit what could be an unabated roadblock of opposition.
As the Washington Post reports, Mattel s recent demonstration of its Internet-connected doll, Hello Barbie, featured the toy responding to its human host by saying: I love New York! Don t you? Tell me, what s your favorite part about the city? The food, fashion or the sights?
While that sort of technical wizardry might wow the socks off doll-loving geeks in Silicon Valley, others were ready to say buh-bye to Hello Barbie.
A children s privacy advocacy group is calling for the company to cease production of the toy, saying Hello Barbie might more accurately be called . Because the doll works by recording children s speech with an embedded microphone and then sending that data over the Web, these advocates call the technology creepy and say it could leave children vulnerable to stealth advertising tactics. On Wednesday, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood urging Mattel to keep the doll from hitting store shelves.
To quote Angela Campbell, faculty adviser at Georgetown University s Center on Privacy and Technology. If I had a young child, I would be very concerned that my child s intimate conversations with her doll were being recorded and analyzed. In Mattel s demo, Barbie asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child, her interests, and her family. This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children.
In fact, according to the Post, Mattel says its software will enable the doll to listen and learn each girl s preferences and then adapt to those accordingly.
Hello Barbie, meet the nice folks at the NSA.
Mattel and ToyTalk, the San Francisco-based start-up behind the talking doll, insist that privacy is a top concern for them.
In an interview, ToyTalk chief executive Oren Jacob stressed that the audio files it captures will only be used to improve the product, such as, for example, by helping the company build better speech recognition models for children.
The data is never used for anything to do with marketing or publicity or any of that stuff. Not at all, Jacob said.
In a statement, the company said that Mattel is committed to safety and security, and Hello Barbie conforms to applicable government standards, including the Children s Online Privacy Protection Act.
Creepy or cute, Hello Barbie is expected to go on sale this fall, a move that Mattel hopes will right is sinking ship.
As the Daily Finance reported, Barbie sales took a big hit this past holiday shopping season because she s got some serious competition — the main characters of the smash 2013 Walt Disney (DIS) film musical Frozen.
But can Elsa and Anna TALK?
Hey… let s ask Barbie!
Credit: Anda Chu/The Daily Review