Tiny Trojan Horses: Privacy, Play, and Contemporary Connected Childhood

Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) / Toronto / Mar 2018

Internet-connected toys such as Hello Barbie (Mattel, 2015) and My Pal Scout (LeapFrog, 2014), are routinely met with a host of concerns over safety, privacy, and ethics. Such concerns were crystallized in an unprecedented July 2017 public service announcement issued by the FBI warning consumers of the vulnerabilities that connected toys pose. Unease around “smart” toys is increasingly common in a rapidly-expanding market of tech-enabled playthings facilitated by deepening ties between the toy industry and technology firms.

Using a series of case studies, such as Mattel’s Smart Toy line of plush animals (2015) and Aristotle, a baby monitor and virtual assistant designed to “grow” with the child (2017), this paper explores the discourses about privacy that circulate around connected toys. I consider the toys’ features, promotional rhetoric, the fine print of their privacy policies, and instances of data breaches to explore the legal, economic, and moral valences of privacy at play in smart toys. The FBI warning stresses risks of “identity fraud” and unspecified “exploitation,” hewing to a vision of children’s safety informed by twentieth-century “stranger danger” discourses. I argue that industry stakeholders benefit from this vision of privacy because their compliance with legal standards such as the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) validates toy company control over children’s data, thereby making conceptions of children’s safety congruent with company profits. This practice of the toy company as privacy gatekeeper is becoming the industry standard as tech toys subject children to ever more sophisticated forms of dataveillance.

Through this analysis, I also chart the emergence of a second marketing trend to combat concerns over children’s safety and privacy—namely, framing the toys themselves as alive. The materiality of Internet of Things (IoT) devices helps such toys avoid the conventional critiques of passivity often associated with kids’ screen-based media, by projecting an ethos of active play. In some smart toys, this engaged play is further stressed by likening the toy’s adaptive functions to children’s development itself—computer and child “learning” from one another. Drawing upon traditional characterizations of toys as friends, confidantes, and even nurturers or tutors, marketing copy simultaneously lauds the toys’ technological features while playing up their evergreen functions as children’s companions.