As someone who has a fair bit of knowledge about security, I'm asking you to please, please don't buy internet-connected children's toys.
@olives it is always creepy
@rrb It's usually a "What on earth are you doing" when you learn how it works.
@olives hard to think of good reasons why strangers should be spying on a kid
@rrb Strangers, no. Maybe, a parent might want to communicate?
But then, it'd be better to just do it through a normal computer or something. I'm not really seeing the value here.
@olives I think the whole IoT business model is extracting data from customers. That is why the security is so bad. It costs the manufacturers money with no return. If the business model depended on making quality products, they would invest in security.
I was always confused by Internet enabled refrigerators. "Why would I want to buy one?" It made no sense.
When I switched to "Why would someone want to sell me one?" It suddenly made sense to me.
Same thing for IoT toys.
Oftentimes, it's completely superfluous to whatever the toy does and it creates security risks for no real good reason.
A general purpose computer usually has a better level of security, at the very least, it's not going to be likely to be so open to the Internet.