Eiliko Toys Left 13 Million Conversations Exposed Online
13 million conversations from about 68,000 active Eiliko robot toys were left exposed in a backend with no login required. Security researcher Sammy Azdoufal discovered the system run by Energize Lab, the maker of Eiliko, and could read transcripts from tens of thousands of users The Verge.
The toys send conversations over Wi-Fi to China, where they are stored on Chinese servers. The United States is the largest market, with more than 31,000 profiles belonging to children.
Energize Lab reads those conversations to build lasting profiles. The profiles include name, age, birthday, profession, family, friends, pets and personality traits. For a toy sold as a companion, that collection is built into the design. Personalization needs memory, and here memory meant keeping full dialogue on company servers plus the details drawn from it.
The failure went beyond text. The company stored photos of children unencrypted at public web addresses. It stored short user audio recordings the same way. No special hacking method was needed. If you knew the address, you could open the file.
The database also allowed full-text search across conversation snippets, meaning every word could be searched. A search for "suicide" brought up excerpts of users asking about death. That shows transcripts were kept as readable, searchable plain text, not as sealed files that cannot be easily read.
Eiliko is sold as a small robotic bag charm, which Energize Lab calls an AI Charm Bot. The company says its Eilik and Eiliko line combines emotional robotics, robots designed to show feeling, with generative AI. Its earlier Eilik robot is described as an open-source desk companion and as redefining emotional hardware. The Eiliko Kickstarter campaign raised over $380,000 from more than 3,000 backers, reaching 3800% of its funding goal.
The connection setup explains the data flow. Eiliko needs Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. Finishing network setup needs a phone's Bluetooth and the Energize Lab app. Running the toy needs a Wi-Fi network or mobile hotspot. The toy itself is largely a microphone, speaker and moving part, while the processing and stored memory sit online.
Energize Lab publishes a Software Privacy Policy that explains how information is collected, used, disclosed, transferred and stored. It also publishes a separate Privacy Policy that describes how personal information is collected, used and shared when people visit or buy from energizelab.com.
The broader context here will be familiar to hardware teams. Doing the AI work online lowers parts cost and lets models be updated quickly. It also creates one central store of private speech and text. Access control becomes the whole security boundary. When that control is missing, encryption at rest does not help, and public links function as a breach.
In my view, three design choices deserve scrutiny from teams in this area. First, routine upload of ongoing conversation for profiling. Second, keeping photos and voice clips at direct web addresses with no access checks. Third, keeping sensitive speech as searchable plain text for internal search. Each choice lowers delay or improves features. Each also widens the damage when something fails.
Worth flagging for parents and business buyers is where the data sits. Storage on Chinese servers is not itself a security flaw. It does set the legal jurisdiction and who can access the systems. Combined with profiles of children that include family structure and daily routine, it raises the stakes well beyond a normal gadget leak.
The longer view is still hopeful for companion robots. Small, expressive machines that remember a name or a pet can be truly engaging. That future stays possible if saving less transcript, short retention, filtering sensitive detail on the device, and using private links that require login and expire become the default.
