After The Fracas Over Hello Barbie, ToyTalk Responds To Its Critics

At New York’s Toy Fair, the toy industry’s big February trade show, visitors to Mattel’s booth were greeted, literally, by Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi–connected doll that uses speech-recognition technology to have real conversations with kids. The prototype was programmed with a few lines of dialogue specific to visiting New York and the Toy Fair, well short of the hours of conversation she’ll be prepared to engage in when she’s released officially later this year. Still, she performed so well that some visitors asked if there was a woman with a microphone hiding behind a curtain, and an unplanned “interview” with CNBC’s Morgan Brennan went off without a hitch. “She went six or seven questions deep,” says former Pixar CTO Oren Jacob, now cofounder and CEO of ToyTalk, the company behind the doll’s conversation technology. “And she crushed it.”

But less than a month later, the advocacy group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC), led by director Susan Linn, launched a nationwide crusade urging Mattel to cancel production of the doll. Their concern: ToyTalk’s technology—which records kids’ speech and sends it to a cloud server for analysis—is “seriously creepy” and would allow Barbie (and therefore Mattel) to eavesdrop on children. Media reports popped up suggesting that the doll would always be on, always listening. By April 1, CCFC’s online petition had received 25,000 signatures.

The controversy underscores how rampantly privacy concerns can spread in today’s hypervigilant environment. ToyTalk’s Jacob was flabbergasted by “inaccuracies that were reported and re-reported,” he says. Hello Barbie is not always recording, he stresses, but rather works like a walkie-talkie, requiring a child to hold down a button (actually, Barbie’s belt buckle) to activate recording. ToyTalk’s technology has already been embraced by more than half a million users of interactive iPad apps like the Winston Show and SpeakaZoo, and privacy concerns had been few and mild. So what made this use different?

All Internet-connected toys and services, including ToyTalk’s, are governed by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which requires parental consent before any kind of data—including voice data—is collected from products created for or used regularly by children under 13. To function fully, Hello Barbie must be synced with an iOS or Android app, at which point parents are required to read and e-sign a three-paragraph consent form detailing what data will be collected and how it will be used.