Mattel has announced a new line of Barbie doll set to hit shelves for the holiday season. This Barbie, called “Hello Barbie”, can not only talk but responds to voices, enabling a conversation with the doll.
The catch is that Barbie has a microphone in her belt that records the voices that speak to it and wirelessly stores them on a cloud server. Mattel says it’s for the purpose of keeping Barbie’s responses up-to-date so that she can better interact with her young owners.
This has some groups calling it “creepy.” Especially an advocacy group called Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), who has launched a petition to keep the dolls off the shelves. They believe that a child at play is when they are the most vulnerable.
Georgetown University Law Professor Angela Campbell said:
"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."
Mattel told parents that they will first ask parental permission before capturing a child’s voice for their server. Yet CCFC doesn’t believe that will necessarily stop children from being exploited. They point out that the current privacy policy at ToyTalk, the company in charge of analyzing Hello Barbie’s recorded data.
They state:
“We may use, store, process and transcribe Recordings in order to provide and maintain the Service, to perform, test or improve speech recognition technology and artificial intelligence algorithms, or for other research and development and data analysis purposes.”
If none of this bothers you then the price tag may be enough to deter you. Hello Barbie is hitting shelves at the retail price of $74.99. It looks like the kids aren’t the only ones at risk of being exploited.