What did that teddy bear say? Study warns parents about AI toys (www.kron4.com)

A new study warns parents that AI-powered toys—stuffed animals, dolls and other playthings with built‑in voice assistants and learning features—can pose privacy, safety and security risks. Researchers examined how these devices capture children’s voice data, send recordings to cloud services for processing, and often store behavioral profiles that can be accessed by manufacturers or third parties. The report highlights real-world concerns such as weak or absent encryption, broad data retention policies, unclear parental controls, and the potential for toys to repeat or misinterpret sensitive information. For the AI/ML community, the findings underscore both technical and ethical implications: voice models in toys are constrained by latency and bandwidth tradeoffs that push processing to cloud servers, expanding the attack surface and increasing data exposure. Model limitations can produce hallucinations, inappropriate responses, or enable social‑engineering vectors aimed at children. The study calls for better on‑device processing, stronger privacy-preserving defaults (encryption, minimal retention, local intent detection), transparent data use policies, and industry standards or regulation to govern training data, consent and safety testing. Designers and researchers should treat child‑facing AI as a high‑risk deployment scenario requiring robust threat modeling, explainability and tighter controls.