ACLU CANCELS Elf on a shelf for normalizing ‘surveillance by authorities’ | Daily Mail Online
His presence means Christmas is just around the corner as he takes messages back to Santa at the North Pole, but the American Civil Liberties Union is concerned about the Elf on a Shelf’s purported nefarious activity, particularly when it comes to surveillance.
The toy, which is based on a 2005 children’s book, is supposed to be a fun and novel idea that families incorporate into their Christmas traditions.
Parents tell their children how the elf magically comes to life each night between Thanksgiving and Christmas in order to report back to Santa about the child’s behavior. It then returns to the home to a different spot than the night before – but the child must not touch it, or it will lose its magic.
But the ACLU together with a number of other privacy and civil rights organizations believe the elf to be invasive, creepy and even dangerous, and they’re telling parents the toy should perhaps ‘be left on store shelves.’
‘I don’t want to sound like a Grinch, but we shouldn’t be celebrating seasonal surveillance,’ Albert Fox Cahn from the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a civil rights and privacy group, told The New York Times.
‘It’s really a terrible message for kids.’
I’ll start worrying about elves when they’re AI enabled and networked into Amazon.