# Lifestyles & Discussion > Privacy & Data Security >  Hello Barbie: Hang On, This Wi-Fi Doll Records Your Child's Voice?

## DamianTV

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/02/19/hello_barbie/

*What could possibly go wrong?*




> Toymaker Mattel has unveiled a high-tech Barbie that will listen to your child, record its words, send them over the internet for processing, and talk back to your kid. It will email you, as a parent, highlights of your youngster's conversations with the toy.
> 
> If Samsung's spying smart TVs creeped you out, this doll may be setting off alarm bells too  so we drilled into what's going on.
> 
> The Hello Barbie doll is developed by San Francisco startup ToyTalk, which says it has more than $31m in funding from Greylock Partners, Charles River Ventures, Khosla Ventures, True Ventures and First Round Capital, and others.
> 
> Its Wi-Fi-connected Barbie toy has a microphone, a speaker, a small embedded computer with a battery that lasts about an hour, and Wi-Fi hardware. When you press a button on her belt buckle, Barbie wakes up, asks a question, and turns on its microphone while the switch is held down.
> 
> The child's replies are recorded, encoded, and sent in an encrypted form to ToyTalk's servers, CEO Oren Jacob explained to The Register. The audio is processed by voice-recognition software, allowing ToyTalk's systems to figure out what was said and how best to reply.
> ...


(Continues on Link)

Now even your TOYS spy on you!  What the $#@! is wrong with this world?

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## Warrior_of_Freedom

I'll just leave this here

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## CPUd

These are going to be a massive fail, especially with 1 hour battery life.  It won't be able to learn fast enough for the kid to toss it into the toybox and move on to the next thing.

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## muh_roads

VPN's like Private Internet Access can be installed in the router.  I think it needs to be flashed with WRT-DD but there are others.

Crank up the encryption to AES-256...
...the authentication up to SHA256...
...and the Handshake up to RSA-4096 or ECC-256k1

That is your best line of device defense for a toy such as this until new encryption algorithms are created without the NIST involved.

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## Anti Federalist

Internet of (creepy) things.

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## William Tell

Hello Barbie. remember Hello Kitty is a little girl?

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