The Easter Bunny wants your Data
Smart toys: interactive friends or surveillance devices? By Prof. Isabel Wagner
About this talk
Smart toys are interactive toys that use sensors to capture their environment and interactions with children and can communicate this data to the internet. They offer children new possibilities for entertainment and playful education. Ten years ago, there were data protection and security scandals surrounding Hello Barbie and My Friend Cayla – but how do today's smart toys fare? This talk provided insights into data protection, security and transparency in smart toys, based on a large-scale analysis of the smart toy market and a detailed examination of 13 smart toys. Although smart toys are becoming increasingly popular, shortcomings have been identified, such as the creation of behavioral profiles of children and a lack of transparency due to insufficient information about data collection and processing.
About the speaker
Isabel Wagner is Associate Professor in Cyber Security at the University of Basel, Switzerland. She studied computer science at the University of Erlangen, Germany, and received her PhD from the same university in 2010. After a postdoc at the University of Osaka, Japan, she worked at the University of Hull, UK (2013-2015), and De Montfort University, Leicester, UK (2015-2022).
Her research interests are privacy and privacy-enhancing technologies, particularly metrics to quantify the effectiveness of privacy protection mechanisms, privacy protections for smart technologies, and measurement studies to create transparency for web and IoT systems. Her 2022 book, Auditing Corporate Surveillance Systems: Research Methods for Greater Transparency, is available from Cambridge University Press.