Toymaker Mattel bills Hello Barbie as the world’s first “interactive doll” due to its ability to record children’s playtime conversations and even respond once the encrypted audio is transmitted to a cloud server, much in the way that Apple’s Siri voice assistant works.
I address new and prospective parents with this paragraph: Ignore me at the peril of your sanity. Quite aside from the awful notion that someone out there might consider a toy actually designed to be eavesdropped upon by strangers to be a good thing, talking toys are evil! Evil! They are of the devil and must be purged with fire!
I know this from personal experience, and pray that the uncontrollable twitching may someday cease. You see, once upon a time someone – and I am filled with horror at the thought that it might have been me – bought my toddler daughter a Murduck. Within days even she was annoyed by the awful thing. I pulled out its batteries and the nightmare ended. Except for the, you know, nightmares. But even they faded somewhat over the years. You literally couldn’t walk past this thing without setting it off. You didn’t have to pick it up and move it, a vibration would suffice. It only had four or five recorded sayings, all moronic puns, and the tinny recorded voice was as annoying as anything I’ve ever heard in my life. As I recall, it had no off switch. And it was a bathtub toy, which meant it occupied our house’s single small bathroom. Waiting.
They died in the toy stores, but are now vintage toys traded on Ebay by ignorant fools who do not understand the foul menace they’re bringing into their homes.
I give you…Murduck.
So seriously: A talking Barbie wins my seal of disapproval before we even get to ‘recording children’s playtime conversations and transmitting them to a cloud server,’ which otherwise would indeed be one of the creepier things I ever heard of.
Murduck…(shudder)
Ah, memories of earlier times, before electronics. At least I don’t remember any in the toys my sons had nearly 50 years ago. But, the nightmare was there indeed. I knew my mother-in-law did not like me from the start, but she made it very clear one day when she gave my two year old a drum. A common, metal thing with two wooden sticks. Don’t remember what the drum head was made from, probably some sort of plastic… And, of course, the boy LOVED it, beat on it constantly and had to be hauled screaming to bed when it was put up for the night. It didn’t last long, I can tell you. Seems it was left in the driveway… and got run over. So sad… The kid got over it eventually, but I never have cared much for drums since then.
Some “toy” recording children’s talk is terrible, but speaking to them from “the cloud.” That’s too horrible to even think about. That one should be left in the driveway too… or tossed onto the freeway.
A fowl menace indeed. Sorry, couldn’t resist:-).
I wonder how long it would take a hacker to get into the Barbie-cloud and reprogram Babs to start saying things like “kill them all”, or “worship the Devil”, or other fun little quips like that…
The Twilight Zone soured me on the entire concept of talking toys thankyouverymuch. *Shudder*
OTOH, Speak ‘n Spell was great. I relly liiked thet thang. The user was in control of when it would vocalize, rather than making you afraid to move.
One wonders how long until one of these records some instance of parental abuse. What do you do with that if you’re mattel?
Do you keep it to yourself because of your privacy policy pormises, and allow a child to be abused?
Or do you report it to the authorities, violate your privacy policy, and end up becoming a corporate “big brother” type eavesdropper?
I can’t figure out which is more contemptible.
Also, one wonders what sort of security software they’ve got on these. I’m thinking down two lines with this – creepy pervs who hack into playtime barbie to get their jollies by spying on children, and the NSA hacking these goddamned things to get an inside line to a residence.
This entire thing is just EWWWW!
I was so glad my step daughter was a little old for them when the Furbys came out. My boss’s kids had them and they were pretty annoying.