Your child’s new best friend might be a Chinese surveillance device

The anxiety surrounding TikTok was never difficult to understand. Parents worried about what their children were watching and how much time they were spending online. Politicians sounded alarms about biased algorithms. Experts warned about mass manipulation.

Letting a foreign-owned app into a teenager’s hand felt like a reckless gamble, because it was. Yet a smartphone still requires a conscious choice to unlock a screen and tap an icon.

Interactive teddy bears, on the other hand, require nothing but an innocent child’s trust. When that cuddly toy rolls off a Chinese assembly line, as most of them do, it opens a pipeline from the playroom straight to a foreign government. American households are welcoming data collection hubs directly into the family circle, by way of devices that arrive