Connected Toys work published by PETRAS

Connected Toys: What Device Documentation Explains about Privacy and Security has been published by PETRAS, the National Centre of Excellence for IoT Systems Cybersecurity.

Download the paper from the UCL repository.

This work is the result of research Sarah undertook as a Research Associate at PETRAS.

This report looks at the amount of safety and privacy information that is publicly available about Internet connected devices that are targeted at children. By reviewing the documentation and advertisements related to 15 prominently marketed devices for children it tries to determine how easy it is for the purchasers of the device to understand whether devices connect to the Internet, and if so, what security and privacy implications it has for carers and for the children themselves. It finds that it is uniformly hard to determine the nature of technology within any given device; where devices do connect to the Internet, no information is provided to users regarding privacy and security best practices, and how functional the device is without connection to the Internet. Similarly, there is limited explanation of the personal data that must be provided to make the device run as intended, and also of how to delete this information once the device is no longer in use.