杏吧原创

Last weekend, I saw my first Christmas ad. And what a Smart Christmas it will be, judging by the haul on offer. Over the past year, companies have been teasing the various connected must-haves for the holidays: bots that can , and capture audio and video; an imitation smartwatch that chats with other devices over Bluetooth; not to mention the Barbie Hello Dreamhouse, a pink-and-white smart house for the iconic doll.

Not everyone is excited about the intelligence creeping into kids鈥� toys. Privacy activists and developmental psychologists have objected on grounds ranging from security and privacy to fundamental worries about the nature of play. So should you be crossing these gadgets off your list? Or is this just a new variation on a familiar old song?

As it happens, Barbie was at the centre of the last big smart toy brouhaha. Hello Barbie, perhaps 2015鈥檚 most controversial toy, could hold court on a wide range of topics 鈥� from fashion and family to dreams and paddleboarding. 鈥淒id you know that butterflies live everywhere in the world except Antarctica?鈥� she might say, before confessing in a less guarded moment to 鈥渄aydreaming about cupcakes鈥�.

Kiddie talk shared

But the problem wasn鈥檛 her words, but that kids could talk to her by holding down her belt buckle. Every word Barbie鈥檚 microphone picked up was transmitted to a Mattel-owned server farm for analysis by speech recognition algorithms, to settle on a suitable reply.

Soon, details emerged about how those recordings were stored and some of the 鈥渢hird parties鈥� they were being shared with. Backlash ensued. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, a non-profit in Boston, launched the social media campaign #HellNoBarbie, urging parents not to buy the doll. 鈥淲e were immediately concerned about the idea of a doll that was recording and capturing children鈥檚 conversations,鈥� says , CCFC鈥檚 executive director. 鈥淚t just struck us as such an invasion of children鈥檚 privacy.鈥�

There鈥檚 nothing illegal about how Hello Barbies work, but you can adhere to every US law and still violate a kid鈥檚 privacy. That鈥檚 because they won鈥檛 have the experience to understand that a toy can鈥檛 keep secrets, and that whatever they tell it is accessible to an unseen team of engineers 鈥� or their parents.

Or hackers. Toys aren鈥檛 fundamentally different to any other connected device 鈥� at least not to their prying fingers. Last year, Hong Kong toy-maker VTech leaked not only the usernames and passwords of its 6.4 million young users, but also photos, download histories and chat logs. Baby monitors have been hacked, too, allowing strangers to peer in at children in their beds and even talk to them.

But not everyone shares the privacy concerns. 鈥淸Hello Barbie] is just as risky as Siri and I鈥檝e told Siri some pretty odd things,鈥� wrote an unrepentant 5-star reviewer.

After all, in a home full of connected devices, where do you draw the line? Maybe Hello Barbie is verboten, but will you let your kid talk to Siri, or Alexa, or any of the other new digital assistants? Those pose many of the same problems as Barbie, and maybe even a few extra ones. San Francisco parent Hunter Walk, for example, expressed worries that the Amazon Echo was , because she didn鈥檛 have to say 鈥減lease鈥� to get Alexa to do what she wanted.

A question of imagination

So why do toys need to be so smart? For all the privacy invasion these chatting skills necessitate, Hello Barbie may not even be a particularly good toy. 鈥淚 think there鈥檚 this idea that, in order to compete with screens, toys have to be more and more like screens,鈥� Golin says. 鈥淏ut actually, given how much time they have with screens, I think what children need are toys that are less and less like screens.鈥� He argues that the best toys are 鈥�90 per cent kid, 10 per cent toy,鈥� with play fuelled largely by the child鈥檚 imagination.

That鈥檚 in line with what research has been telling us for decades about the evolutionary and cognitive purposes of play. Pretend play, in particular, is how kids learn complicated skills like divergent thinking, the use of symbols, even .

Toys can be part of that. But with products like Hello Barbie, kids end up providing rote answers to preprogrammed questions, rather than imagining who the doll is and what she might chat about. 鈥淧lay ends up being completely driven by the script in the algorithm,鈥� Golin says.

But maybe smart toys offer a different kind of educational opportunity: they could start teaching kids the digital literacy skills needed in a 鈥渟mart鈥� world.

, a professor of communication, culture and technology at Georgetown University in Washington DC, doesn鈥檛 necessarily buy it. 鈥淏eing smart about the way we use technology is really challenging for adults,鈥� she says. 鈥淭he idea that we would expect this from a child is obviously absurd.鈥�

Instead, as smart objects become more common, Jones would like to see us find a way to automatically signal our privacy preferences. That way, you鈥檇 never have to wonder if there鈥檚 a device quietly recording you, be it a drone overhead or a nephew鈥檚 teddy bear.

We鈥檙e still just figuring out what it will mean to grow up immersed in smart technology. The side effects may be subtle, as in the viral video of a toddler, raised on iPads, stubbornly trying to swipe the dead-tree pages of a magazine. And let鈥檚 not forget that adults have been whipping up moral panics about the degeneration of toys since the first child picked up a rock instead of the traditional stick.

While we figure it all out, my advice is to buy your kid a different kind of smart toy this Christmas 鈥� maybe one of the many robots that can teach even the youngest kids to code. Perhaps this will let your kid engage in the hacking equivalent of a time-honoured ritual of Barbie owners around the world: .