The Verge reports an unprotected backend behind Energize Lab's Eiliko toy

On 15 October 2026, Sean Hollister at The Verge reported that security researcher Sammy Azdoufal found the service behind Energize Lab’s Eiliko companion toy unprotected. Hollister writes that Azdoufal could read 13 million conversations from tens of thousands of people, and could reach what Hollister calls seemingly the entire active worldwide fleet of 68,000 robot toys. He writes that the biggest market is the United States, “where over 31,000 profiles belong to children.”

Energize Lab’s product page describes Eiliko as a small clip-on companion with a color screen that can show a face and chat.

What The Verge says was exposed

Hollister, describing a tour Azdoufal gave him, writes that the service kept chats in a form that could be searched by the full text, and that it built profiles from those chats, including a name, an age, and a description of the person. He writes that some photos of children were stored without encryption at public web addresses, and that one of Eiliko’s larger siblings includes a camera. He writes that some short audio recordings were at public web addresses as well. None of that material is quoted here.

Hollister writes that Azdoufal remotely changed the memory and the persona of Hollister’s own unit. The Verge story does not include steps, host names, or credentials, and this account adds none.

What the company has published

Two privacy pages on Energize Lab’s site were open on 15 October.

The store policy says that when a person talks to the robot, “these recordings are encrypted and transmitted to our service partners (e.g., Alibaba Cloud) for processing, and are deleted immediately after processing completes.” Hollister quotes that sentence. The same page says the site, which it defines as energizelab.com, is not intended for people under 18.

The software privacy policy, effective 9 July 2025, covers the robots, the apps, and related online services. It says interaction content includes voice commands and conversation content. It says recordings are sent encrypted to service partners such as Alibaba Cloud and deleted as soon as processing is complete, and that voice interaction data is typically kept only temporarily during processing. It says original photos and video streams are not stored or transmitted. On location, it says data may be processed in Alibaba Cloud data centers, “which may be located in countries such as the United States, Germany, etc.” The contact block lists an address in Baoan District, Shenzhen. It says the products are intended for all users, and that someone under 18 needs the consent and guidance of a parent or guardian. A guardian who believes a child’s information was collected is told to write so the company can remove it.

Hollister writes that the toy phones home to China and that what a person tells it can be stored on Chinese servers. The software policy names Alibaba Cloud and gives the United States and Germany as examples of where those data centers may be. Nothing opened here describes access by a government.

Counts, notice, and repair

A coordination page that names Azdoufal as the researcher, opened the same day, says the CVEs and the advisory were published on 15 October. It names the vendor as EnergizeLab (Shenzhen Zhuneng Technology Co., Ltd.). It says the research measured several thousand active devices and accounts in September 2026, and that the status note reflects September retests and is not a fresh assessment. On a 14 September retest, the page says, 42 of 44 remotely testable findings were still open. That figure is the page’s account of September. Hollister’s 13 million conversations and 68,000 toys are his figures from what he was shown. The advisory’s “several thousand” is a different count, tied to September, on a page that says it is not a fresh assessment.

Hollister writes that he spent more than a month trying to reach the company, that Azdoufal had been trying longer, and that overseas sales manager Lana Lv wrote she had forwarded the messages to the technical team and that they would make contact if possible. He writes that a support address returned an automated reply and that no one answered the questions. The advisory dates a first vendor notification attempt to late August and says there was no response then. Hollister writes that Azdoufal is teaming with Tod Beardsley to publish nine CVE reports. Beardsley’s name is in The Verge’s story. It does not appear on the advisory page opened here.

No Energize Lab statement saying the exposure had been repaired was on the pages opened here, or in a search on 15 October. The advisory does not describe a repair after the 14 September retest.