Tools

Kitchen Table Lab

Smart speakers, cameras and websites do three things: they hear, they see, and they leave a trail. That does not mean they remember everything. These three tricks make it visible, together with your child.

Privacy in short: All three demos run in your browser. No servers, no accounts, no real tracking. Listening eye and Face dot keep sound and video local. Data crumbs can optionally remember briefly in this tab, as practice, not as tracking.

The trilogy

Three steps, three senses. Do them in order or one at a time. Each experiment takes a few minutes.

1. Hear

Listening eye

See instantly when the microphone is listening along. Eye open? Mic on. Eye closed? Mic off.

Safe & private: nothing is recorded or stored.
Open Listening eye
2. See

Face dot

See instantly when the camera sees you. Green dot on your face? You are in view. Hand over the lens? Dot gone!

Safe & private: the camera only looks, nothing is saved.
Open Face dot
3. Trail

Data crumbs

Like Hansel and Gretel, each click leaves a digital trail behind. With every step the mist lifts and the path to your 'castle' becomes clearer.

Safe & private: a kitchen-table demo that only runs in this browser tab.
Open Data crumbs

How to use them

Pick one demo or do all three in a row.
Read the privacy note on the tool page first. Explain that this is a trick, not a real product.
Let your child click. Talk aloud about what you see: eye open, dot on your face, crumbs on the path home.

Why three demos?

Many KidTech products have no screen. You cannot see when they listen, when a camera detects a face, or how fast a digital trail grows. This trilogy makes each of those three things visible, without the cloud.

Real products may send data onward. This page is for discovering together how it works, not for spreading fear.

Where does this fit?

The demos were built as whiteboxing alongside my post on AI teddies and the bedroom checklist.

Read the AI teddy post