Oh, boy, an internet-enabled Barbie doll that uses speech recognition to talk to little kids!
Sounds interesting! What could possibly go wrong!?
The BBC reports that a prototype of this joke-telling, story-swapping, interactive game-playing toy was introduced at the New York Toy Fair on Saturday.
Valentine’s Day, of course!
I, like what Barbie maker Mattel says are “girls around the world”, desperately want to talk to a plastic doll, in a far more meaningful and bi-directional way than ever.
So I immediately hopped online to do a search for a video that would give me a preview.
What popped up first was, well, not the “Hello Barbie” doll herself, but the “Come On Barbie, Let’s Go Party” song. If you’ve never heard it, it features really nice lyrics about partying with Barbie, and touching her everywhere, and… hang on one minute…
Kiss me here, touch me there, hanky panky!
…wait just one minute…. hanky panky?! Touching? Touching WHERE!?
Oh dear no, we don’t want any talk of touching or hanky panky with a Wi-Fi-enabled toy, yikes!
That gives me flashbacks to the horrific stalker child predator lurking behind that demon feline Talking Angela, the smartphone app with the talking cat, behind whose eyes you could see a guy in a room! Snapping pictures of kids!!
The lurking paedophile who supposedly defied the laws of physics to show up in an animated cat’s eyeballs over the internet was, of course, just an extremely widespread, notably spittle-flecked hoax.
Will Hello Barbie likewise spark FULL CAP DIRE MISPELT WARNINGS TO STAY AWAY FROM CREEPS TALKING 2 YR KIDS THRU HIR DOLL?!
Could be. Wouldn’t be terribly surprising.
But beyond baseless hoax mongering that could scare people away from a perfectly innocent doll – one with software that’s upgraded over Wi-Fi and will at some point be giving your kids career advice, learning as it interacts, much like Apple’s digital helper Siri or Microsoft’s virtual assistant Cortana – there does, in fact, lie the potential for actual hacking.
The thing is, internet-enabled toys are just about as safe from hacking as internet anything.
We’ve already seen proof that such toys are vulnerable. As the BBC reports, the Vivid Toy group released Cayla, a doll that uses speech-recognition and Google’s translation tools, in November.
By January, security researcher Ken Munro had discovered a vulnerability in the doll’s software that allowed for it to be compromised and programmed to say anything, including things that you certainly wouldn’t want your children to hear.
In fact, The Mirror got Munro to make Cayla quote Hannibal Lecter and lines from “50 Shades Of Grey.”
Munro warned that if a Cayla owner’s phone is off or out of range, any device could effectively connect with the doll via Bluetooth and therefore communicate with your child.
We don’t want to hear Hello Barbie giggling about fava beans and a nice Chianti. Let’s hope Mattel locks her down with better security than Cayla got.
Here’s a preview of what Hello Barbie’s supposed to sound like, courtesy of Chip Chick.
Anonymous
Talk about the IoT! TV’s that listen to our conversations, cars that can get p0wned, and now creepy toys for kids. Aside from identity theft that may eventually become the majority of Internet users, someone has to explain to me why the Internet is so great. Oh yeah, I forgot, it gives our governments and companies a way to keep track of everything we do.
Anonymous
“Let’s have a fun shopping trip! Go get mommy’s credit card and tell me the numbers on the front! Now the numbers on the back! Good girl!”
Deramin
I thought meaningful and bi-directional communication was what human beings were for. Dolls are for projecting your own thoughts and imagination onto. Or to have someone to enjoy that awesome Knex fortress you build. Maybe that was just me.
Little girls may be about as cruel and amoral as your average malicious hacker, but at least the amount of damage they can do is relatively contained. Sort of.
Fagin
Just as well it’s ToyTalk and not TalkTalk (q.v.) responsible for the security. Imagine hacking that database and “reprogramming it” – to get Barbie to request private details, reply in profanities, urge children to stick their fingers in electric sockets etc.