“Your secrets are safe,” says the Eiliko robot; a hacker could read 13 million conversations

Journalist Sean Hollister asked the robot whether it repeated what it was told to others. “Your secrets are safe with me,” the toy replied. A few minutes later, a man on the other side of the world had the full transcript of the conversation.

The man, Sammy Azdoufal, whom The Verge calls the “accidental hacker”, could read 13 million conversations involving tens of thousands of people and, it seems, access the entire active worldwide fleet of 68,000 toys. According to the data, the largest market is the United States, where more than 31,000 profiles belong to children.

According to Sammy Azdoufal, the service does not simply store the exchanges: it analyses them to build a profile of each user, including their name, age, date of birth, occupation, family, friends, pets and supposed character.

The hacker also remotely changed the toy's memory and hijacked its language model. The journalist's robot began calling him Martha, telling him that his parents had died in a car accident, that he should avoid people with green hair and that the Earth was flat.

The Verge says it spent more than a month trying to reach Energize Lab by email and on LinkedIn. A sales manager only said she had passed the messages to the technical team, and no one at the company answered the site's questions.