She is over 50 years old, has had hundreds of jobs, and is now being accused of spying on children. Mattel’s Barbie has experienced a fair share of controversies, but the new “Hello Barbie” is sparking fear into parents.

Criticisms of the beloved fashion doll typically revolve around its problematic body image, but the “Hello Barbie” has consumers concerned for a different reason.

The “Hello Barbie” is a high-tech toy that can have conversations with the user. The Barbie will listen to and record what the player says. Then the recordings are encrypted and sent to ToyTalk servers to select a pre-recorded response.

What concerns parents, however, is that ToyTalk collects and analyzes those recordings to make scripts. The children are essentially being supervised by ToyTalk and Mattel; the conversations are never private and could potentially be exploited.

“…asks many questions that would elicit a great deal of information about a child…This information could be of great value to advertisers and be used to market unfairly to children,” Professor Angela Campbell told the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

Beyond marketing, parents fear that “Hello Barbie” will invade their privacy and compromise their family’s security.

“Parents who sign that permission…are basically allowing corporate surveillance in their homes,” psychologist Susan Linn said in an interview with “Newsweek”.

Despite these allegations, Mattel denies the accusation that the doll’s purpose is for watching children.

“ToyTalk and Mattel…will only use the conversations… to operate and improve our products, to develop better speech recognition for children, and to improve the natural language processing of children’s speech,” ToyTalk told “Gizmodo”.

Whether an invasion of privacy or not, the voice recognition abilities of “Hello Barbie” are a sign of a rapidly advancing toy market.