Abstract
Current smart toy parental control tools offered by toy companies do not adequately support parents in protecting their children. Moreover, there is no reference solution in the literature to be used by toymakers. Most studies are limited to mentioning the importance and purpose of these tools or some specific requirements. This article proposes a reference solution for smart toy parental control tools, with which parents can take control and adequately manage their children’s data according to their preferences. This reference solution comprises a recommended list of requirements, a conceptual model, and a prototype developed as a proof of concept for the solution. An analysis highlights that current legal standards for privacy protection do not satisfy the requirements raised in this study. Furthermore, the results of an evaluation conducted with experts show that the proposed solution is adequate to be used as a reference by academia and industry.
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Notes
A benchmark proposed by the European Commission Safer Internet Programme (EU-SIP).
The Parental Control prototype tool application can be downloaded at https://github.com/OtavioAlb/ParentalControlPrototype
The Parental Control prototype tool source code can be downloaded at https://github.com/OtavioAlb/ParentalControlApp
The prototype was implemented for the purpose of feasibility analysis and demonstration of the proposed features, and Android was chosen for this purpose. However, each commercial tool can be developed following the specific technological preferences of each toymaker, which can develop their own tool using platforms other than Android, such as iOS.
The prototype uses a privacy policy adapted from https://www.toymail.co/pages/privacy.
Other mobile services can be added, such as text.
Game: gameplay performance; personal: the user’s use of the toy; marketing: commerce and business strategy; administrative: the internal administrative processes of the toy company; research: scientific research; any: any of the purposes listed above.
Individual: the users themselves or a linked mobile service; group: a group of users, e.g., for multiplayer toys; third-party: an external entity, restricted by the person responsible to the holder of the object to which access has been requested; any: any internal or external entity.
Others besides COPPA and PIPEDA can be added.
No retention: retained for only a brief moment and then destroyed without storage; stated purpose: retained only for the time needed to fulfill the stated purpose and is discarded as soon as the purpose is completed; legal requirement: retained only for a stated purpose as required by law or liability under applicable law; business practices: retained in accordance with the business practices stated in the app’s service terms; indefinitely: retained for an indefinite period of time, as intended by the data consumer; custom: retained for the time determined by the user.
The screens proposed in the prototype for these features are not presented here.
The screens proposed in the prototype for these features are not presented here.
The screens proposed in the prototype for these features are not presented here.
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Acknowledgments
This study was financed in part by the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior - Brasil (CAPES) – Finance Code 001. The authors of this work would like to thank the Center for Artificial Intelligence (C4AI-USP) and the support from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP grant \#2019/07665-4) and from the IBM Corporation.
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de Paula Albuquerque, O., Fantinato, M., Hung, P.C.K. et al. Recommendations for a smart toy parental control tool. J Supercomput 78, 11156–11194 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04319-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-022-04319-4