First announced in January, the device was to be called Aristotle and was a tall cylinder, reminiscent of Amazon’s Echo smart speaker. A campaign organised by US nonprofit Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood demanded Mattel not release the Aristotle. “Young children should not be guinea pigs for AI experiments,” the campaign letter concluded. They sent Mattel a letter at the end of September expressing “serious privacy concerns” about the devices ability to create an “in-depth profile of children and their family”. A wifi-enabled Barbie released in 2015 was discovered to be easy to hack into, allowing an attacker access to the doll’s system information, account information, stored audio files and direct access to the microphone.

Source: The Guardian October 06, 2017 14:26 UTC