No Transparency for Smart Toys

Smart toys combine traditional playtime with modern technologies, integrating IoT features like communication, computation, and sensing to create interactive toys that respond to their environment, offering children new options for entertainment and playful education. However, despite well-documented privacy and security shortcomings of IoT devices, there are no recent studies on the privacy and security properties of smart toys. This is critical because children are a particularly vulnerable group whose personal data merits special protection. In this paper, we therefore examine 12 smart toys available in the EU market with regard to their security, privacy, and transparency. Our main findings include widespread behavioral profiling of children via toy analytics data and a lack of transparency due to insufficient and not easily accessible information about data collection and processing.