Debuting at CES, the Kata Friend is designed to be a "soulmate" that uses 360-degree cameras and advanced AI to track your movements and analyze your mood in real-time. If you are sad, it might play soothing music; if you are angry, it presumably uploads that metadata to a cloud server to adjust your ad targeting profile.
For governance professionals, this device represents the ultimate "Shadow IT" nightmare: a listening device disguised as a toy that bypasses all parental firewalls by being "cute." The manufacturers promise that the bear is here to help, but historically, putting cameras inside stuffed animals was a tactic reserved for Cold War spies, not sleep aids.
We look forward to the inevitable class-action lawsuit when it turns out the bear has been judging our interior decorating choices and sending the transcripts to a data broker in Shenzhen.
Governance Tip If a toy requires a Wi-Fi connection to hug you, check the data retention policy before you cry in front of it.
Read the Original Tom's Guide: The weirdest gadgets of CES 2026
Note This is satire commenting on publicly reported news.
See Also Case File (coming soon): The Elf on the Shelf was a GDPR Violation.
