Regulators treated a child surveillance toy as an illegal spy device

Evidence

In 2017 Germany’s Federal Network Agency banned the Cayla doll as an illegal surveillance device and urged parents to destroy any such dolls in their possession. In the US the FTC had yet to take any action against the doll or Genesis Toys. Meanwhile, the connected dollhouse prepares our children and families for the connected room (a project that Mattel announced in January 2017 and then nine months later shelved amid an uproar from parents and privacy advocates), which paves the way for the connected home, whose purveyors hope will numb us to the connected world as we travel the path of ubiquity’s manifest destiny and its promise of surveillance revenues. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 834

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why did the German regulator classify Cayla as surveillance while the FTC declined action? Worth investigating the regulatory jurisdictional divergence.
• XREF: Echoes the pattern in ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ of targeted state responses to cultural/technological practices; also the gender/state dynamic in Naqvi’s Home Boy. — connects to: The surveillance horizon extends to children’s toys that harvest underage behavioral surplus — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 827
• SHARE: A German agency telling parents to literally smash a doll for surveillance is a striking, narrow regulatory fact worth sending to anyone interested in data-protection law or child-tech policy.