February 2016

In the age of the Internet of Things, teddy bears and Barbie dolls aren’t just silent inanimate dummies anymore, but can actually listen and talk to children. But these gizmos are sometimes too chatty, and can expose the personal information of their little owners. A bug in the web platform of the Fisher Price Smart Toy Bear potentially allowed hackers to compile a database of all the children using the toy, according to recent research.

The research highlights the dangers of so-called “smart” toys, just a few weeks after privacy and security researchers found multiple flaws that could turn the Internet-connected Hello Barbie doll into a surveillance device. Fisher Price’s Internet-connected teddy bear has a tiny camera on its nose. The camera reads a set of smart cards that will trigger the bear to tell jokes, teach kids curious facts, and other specific learning and playing activities. The bear is also able to respond to the children’s questions, according to Fisher Price. The toy also comes with an app for parents, which allows them to control it remotely. A researcher at security firm found that a flaw in the app’s platform web service or API allowed hackers to easily find out the names, birthdates and gender of the children using the toy.

Nielsen, the 93-year-old company that has long operated an effective monopoly over television ratings in the United States, is facing blistering criticism from TV and advertising executives who see it as a relic of television’s rabbit-ears past as the digital revolution transforms how people consume entertainment. New competition — notably the $768 million merger of the media measurement companies comScore and Rentrak — is forcing Nielsen to evolve.

One of the latest public criticisms was made in Jan, when Linda Yaccarino, the ad sales chief at NBCUniversal, complained that Nielsen was failing to accurately measure TV and account for all of the television group’s audiences. “Imagine you’re a quarterback, and every time you threw a touchdown, it was only worth four points instead of six,” she said in an address at the International CES trade show. The stakes are high. Some $70 billion in advertising dollars are traded in the United States each year based on Nielsen’s ratings, and hundreds of television programs live or die based on that viewership data. Chief among the complaints about Nielsen is that viewers across the country are streaming billions of hours of video on outlets like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu, but that their behavior is not being captured in industry ratings based on Nielsen data.