The Device That Can’t Legally Exist in a Room With Children | travis gilly | 14 comments

OpenAI has proven, once again, that children are the last thing they think about. They’re shipping an always-on listening device later this year. It’s called Dime. It streams audio to their cloud. And three weeks before the hardware leak dropped, they announced they’re putting ads in ChatGPT. Always-on microphone. Ad-funded AI. We’ve seen this movie. It was called Alexa. It was called Google Nest. Both got caught with employees listening to recordings from people’s homes. Those devices sat on a kitchen counter. Dime goes in your ears. Everywhere. All day. Here’s what nobody in the tech press is talking about: this device structurally cannot comply with COPPA, the federal law protecting children’s privacy. COPPA requires direct parental notice and separate consent before collecting a child’s voice. Not a Terms of Service checkbox. Not an age gate. Direct, standalone notice to parents. Dime doesn’t need a child to have an account. It just needs a child to be in the room. One kid speaks near a Dime wearer, and their voice is captured, streamed, and processed by an ad-supported AI. No notice. No consent. No opt-out possible. Sound doesn’t check a box before entering a microphone. The amended COPPA rule’s compliance deadline is April 22, 2026. Dime ships months later. OpenAI has published no compliance framework for ambient child audio capture. I wrote the full legal and technical breakdown in an article below.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.