Eiliko is a desktop robot toy that chats with its owner. An investigation published by The Verge on October 15, 2026 found its cloud service essentially unguarded: security researcher Sammy Azdoufal says he could reach backend data for roughly 68,000 active devices worldwide, including a full-text searchable database holding more than 13 million conversation snippets. Azdoufal previously exposed similar flaws in DJI robot vacuums and baby monitors. This time, he retrieved the complete transcript of a conversation he had just had with the toy, pulled live from the system. As of publication, the maker, Energize Lab, had not responded to The Verge's request for comment.
It is not just chat logs — it is a profile built on every user
The content is the alarming part. The toy reads conversations and automatically builds a dossier on each user: name, age, birthday, profession, family, friends, pets, even personality judgements and emotional states, stored alongside email addresses and IP addresses. The United States is its biggest market, and more than 31,000 of the profiles belong to children. A larger sibling model with a camera had stored photos of children unencrypted at public web addresses, and some short audio clips were retained even though the company's own privacy policy says recordings are deleted immediately after processing. Admin account passwords were weak enough to appear on common-password lists — the back door had a toy lock. The privacy bill for connected robots entering the home has been tallied before for robot vacuums; for a toy, the bill is heavier, because what it collects is children's words.
The worst risk is not being read — it is being rewritten
Data exposure is bad enough, but the access also reaches control: someone with entry could alter the settings of the model behind the toy and thereby steer what it says to a child. A device positioned as a trusted friend, reciting lines written by a stranger, targets the audience least able to tell the difference. The dossiers themselves are ready-made targeting material for scams, noting who feels low, who distrusts their family, in plain text. This is not a case of a vendor storing a few logs too many. It is the product logic of companion AI — it must remember you to feel like it knows you — running with no security to speak of.
If one of these toys is already at home, do three things
First, try it offline: how much still works with Wi-Fi off tells you whether it is a toy or a recording terminal. Second, go through the companion app's settings and the privacy policy, find the data deletion route, and if there is none, send the maker a written deletion request and keep the receipt. Third, set a household rule for children: never tell the toy real names, schools or home addresses — the same rule as for strangers. When buying new devices, treat where conversation data lives, how long it stays and whether it can be deleted as questions on the same level as battery life and sound quality. A companion toy whose maker cannot answer them can wait, however cute it is.
