'Ban doll that will listen to children'
Privacy advocates condemn 'smart' Barbie - expected to be a hit this Christmas - for its capability to eavesdrop on intimate thoughts
A "smart" Barbie doll that can have "conversations" with children should not go on sale, privacy advocates have said.
Billed as the world's first "interactive doll", the toy uses voice recognition technology similar to that used by Apple's Siri and Google's Now digital assistants to understand what a child is saying to Barbie and respond.
However, privacy advocates are worried about the use of voice recognition technology that sends recordings of children to third-party companies for processing, potentially revealing intimate thoughts and details.
"If I had a young child, I would be very concerned that my child's intimate conversations with her doll were being recorded and analysed," said Professor Angela Campbell of Georgetown University law school.
"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."
The conversation capabilities of the Hello Barbie toy from Mattel are powered by a venture capital-backed San Francisco start-up called ToyTalk, which receives and interprets speech recorded by a microphone in the doll before initiating a pre-programmed vocal response. Crucially, the data is stored by ToyTalk for use beyond the immediate response.
"ToyTalk and Mattel will only use the conversations recorded through Hello Barbie to operate and improve our products, to develop better speech recognition for children, and to improve the natural language processing of children's speech," a ToyTalk spokesperson said.