// THE VERGE — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
Your secrets aren’t safe with this cute robot toy — they’re on Chinese servers ready to be hacked
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Eiliko and its manufacturer, Energize Lab, are seemingly not to be trusted.
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There’s a new digital pet in town — a cute little marshmallow of a robot that can change its cartoony expressions to match your mood. But if you or your kids talk to “Eiliko” over Wi-Fi, it’ll phone home to China. Its AI companion can store literally everything you tell it on Chinese servers, where hackers can easily gain access or even hijack its personality. And the company that made it, Energize Lab, doesn’t seem to care.
I bought an Eiliko from Amazon on August 29th. During a 10-minute conversation on August 30th, I asked the little bot: “Do you ever tell anybody else what I’m saying?”
Within minutes, a man on the other side of the planet had a complete transcript of everything I’d told the toy.
He didn’t just have my conversations, either. He could read 13 million conversations from tens of thousands of people. He could access seemingly the entire active worldwide fleet of 68,000 robot toys. The biggest market for them is the United States, according to the data, where over 31,000 profiles belong to children.