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Comment by cm2187 | Hacker News Reader

> The Germans had a good point: kids' toys which record their voices and send the recordings up to the web pose some serious privacy risks. It's not that the risks are particularly any different to the ones you and I face every day with the volumes of data we produce and place online (and if you merely have a modern phone, that's precisely what you're doing), it's that our tolerances are very different when kids are involved

It's a bit paradoxical. There are way less things a kid can say that can get him in trouble than an adult. Even the most oppressive regime will not hold what a 4yo toddler says against him. The need for privacy should rather be less for a kid than for an adult.

What it means is that violations of privacy are creepy, period. We try to rationalise it by arguing that we get something out of it, but when dealing with our kids, we stop believing our own bullshit and it is just becomes purely creepy...

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First, it's not just about "get [them] in trouble". Think about ten years later. Do we want adversaries to have logs of children's conversations?

Also, It's not just recordings. Once an adversary has account access, they can talk to children. I can't imagine that being a good thing.

Additionally, what benefit do we have to gain by preserving these recordings? The whole thing seems massively risky for no reason other than to make a few bucks.

> The whole thing seems massively risky for no reason other than to make a few bucks.

That's, unfortunately, the very reason why most of IoT stuff exists.

People kept devices which allowed strangers to talk to their children sitting in their house, often in the children's bedroom for nearly a century and it wasn't a major problem. The vast majority of child abuse (like 95+%) is committed by parents or close family members. The danger of strangers is overblown and you shouldn't have to harp on that to get people concerned about companies unnecessarily snarfing up every bit of data about everyone of every age.

Yeah, I'm not worried about my kid saying things that will get him in trouble. However... he repeats literally everything that he hears, sometimes verbatim. Sometimes hours or days layer. To be honest, it's really creepy at times. Plus, he doesn't really have a filter, so he'll talk about everything he sees at school or on the playground, just chattering about all day to himself.

So I'm worried about my kid saying things that could get other people into trouble.

A common anecdote from East Germany is that teachers would ask children what the "sandman" looks like (an evening TV show for children). The seemingly harmless answer then revealed whether their parents secretly watched imperialist West-German television. So yeah, children are pretty good at implicating other people.

(No real source, but a random German article that quotes this anecdote: http://www.badische-zeitung.de/panorama/der-freundliche-herr...)

More innocuous example:

I remember when being a kid in school, the police were by for a visit to educate on alcohol responsibility, and touching on ethanol/methanol dangers since moonshine was a thing, they showed a distiller (which "if clearly meant for distilling spirits" is illegal to own), and some kid blurted out "my dad has one of those!" immediately when seeing it.

The teacher tried to claim "teacher-parent confidentiality" when asked to identify the kid/parents as if that's a thing, but I don't think they took it seriously enough to warrant further action.

Nevertheless; yeah, kids say everything.

This was common in all Eastern Bloc countries. In Poland under Russian occupation UB/SB https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Służba_Bezpieczeństwa "secret police responsible for internal and external intelligence and counterintelligence to fight underground movements and the influence of the Catholic Church" would send its agents to schools to befriend children and try to get them to rat on the parents.

Exactly. And give a kid any kind of recording devices chances are they'll also end up recording you at times you wouldn't expect to be recorded.

There's always the possibility that the toy overhears adults.

I think it's possibly a bit more that we rationalize it as an adult because we can make a choice to give up the privacy or not. For a child they haven't developed mentally yet to understand that choice. That said I agree that the child has less potential for revealing information.

Even calling it a choice is rationalizing the loss of privacy. Most services are a binary choice of giving up privacy or not using the service. Some services can be done without, but many are required to operate in a modern society.

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