In case you were wondering, yes, GCHQ banned them too. This incident also led to one of the funniest FAA papers ever.
On top of them just being really fucking annoying, especially in a cube farm, they’re also small battery powered devices with a speaker. AKA: a perfect listening tool hider. If you have classified projects of course security is going to ban them
They also “learned” and had the ability to repeat back some of what it hears, not so good for protecting secrets
Common misconception, they didn’t repeat anything. They just gradually spoke more of whatever language they were in. The only thing that was kind of like learning is they could react to is other nearby furbies
Just to common sense check this: around this time the video games Seaman and Hey You! Pikachu came out with dedicated microphone accessories, had a video game console to power them, and they barely functioned. You think a $35 plastic toy will pull it off?
At the time Furbies were popular, there were other stuffed animals that did the recording and talk-back thing. Dont seem reliable enough for spy work, though.
Recording and playing back absolutely could be done, but learning words the way people said they were at the time was probably too tricky
Yak bak
I had a yak bakwards. Which at least had some kind of toy function, in that you could play the 3 or 4 second recording forwards or backwards. That was minutes of entertainment.
I had both and would use the original to “back up” my clips
I remember having one as a kid. I get that the gimmick was that it was supposed to learn human language progressively, but I kept wondering why mine never improved. Turns out that the translation for Spanish was so awful that it was often downright confusing to use.
“Ruido abajo, por favor” does not mean “keep noise down” but “(make) noise below, please.” 🙃
Pretty sure this was an answer on Jeopardy! last week.
