Hello Barbie and the Internet of Things

Categories: Information

“I hear the secrets that you keep/When you’re talking in your sleep.”
–The Romantics

Hello Barbie is Mattel’s newest Barbie doll; the company demonstrated the doll at the New York Toy Fair in February and plans to begin selling it this fall.. Mattel says that the doll was designed in response to its marketing surveys, which indicated that the thing most little girls wanted was to be able to talk to their Barbies. Hello Barbie can not only talk, she can talk about the things her owners are discussing. How? The doll has a microphone that can record speech when a button is pressed. The recording is then transmitted over Wi-Fi to the Internet, processed and analyzed, and then Barbie says something in response. This is similar to the way Siri works, but it’s the first time it’s been done to a toy.

So just to make it simple:

• This doll records conversations around it when a button is pressed.
• The recordings are sent to a company’s servers.
• Speech analysis determines what is being said.
• An appropriate response is sent back to the doll.

This is all part of the Internet of Things (IoT)”, a term you’ve probably heard recently. The idea is that the Internet, once a way of hooking together computers to share information, will now also become a way of connecting almost every item we use. This way, we’ll all have access to important information at any time, and we’ll be able to control our devices from almost anywhere. There are some real benefits to the idea. Controlling your heating/cooling system to make sure your house is at a comfortable temperature when you’re there becomes much easier and more efficient. Devices that are wearing out can report their status so you don’t get caught by unexpected failures. There also some very serious privacy concerns as well, however.

In the case of Hello Barbie, I wonder what else Mattel will do with the data generated from the recorded conversations. Will the company use it for marketing? (I’d be surprised if it doesn’t.) Who controls it – Mattel, the company’s partner or someone else? What safeguards are there to keep Hello Barbie’s data secure as it travels from the doll to the Internet and back?

ToyTalk has addressed some of these concerns, but has it done enough? I don’t know. I know what the company has said, and I know how much I trust large corporations to keep their word when there’s a strong financial incentive to break it. And even if it does do what it has said, I know how endlessly creative the hackers are and how insecure much of the infrastructure of the Internet is.

As we implement more and more of the Internet of Things, we’re going to see more security holes. We need to think about each new thing we connect to be sure it’s safe, whether it’s a television or a doll.