Featured on SRF News: AI in kids' rooms - toys that listen in
Our study "AI-powered smart toys: interactive friends or surveillance devices?" was featured in the SRF News Magazine "10 vor 10"
Our study "AI-powered smart toys: interactive friends or surveillance devices?", presented at the IoT Conference 2024, was featured on Swiss television in the SRF News Magazine "10 vor 10" (in German).
The paper reports results from an initial study of the privacy practices of a specific AI toy: Grok from Curio Interactive Inc. Using an experimental black-box study design, we evaluate network traffic and interaction patterns to infer possible privacy issues. We find that the toy transmits a continuous data stream to the servers while it is switched on, which indicates that it could be used for audio surveillance of its environment.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3703790.3703841
The PDF of the study is available here.
This is joint work with Valentyna Pavliv and Nima Akbari.