Furby: The Toy That Caused The Government To Panic

TRANSCRIPT

During Christmas break back in 1998, my neighbor’s little sister got this toy, and it started talking in the middle of the night when nobody was in the room. I’ll never forget this. We put it in the garage. It kept talking. The next place it went was the trash.

I’m telling you this because the NSA, the National Security Agency, had the same instinct. They had considerably more information than my neighbor’s family did back in 1998.

In January 1999, the NSA banned this toy from secure facilities.

Think about it. The most powerful signals intelligence organization on the planet looked at a six-inch animatronic toy that said “Domo” and went to sleep if you ignored it and said, “No. Not in our buildings.”

Maybe they were wrong about the toy, but maybe they weren’t so wrong about the fear.

This is Totally Unfounded. I’m JB.

Furby launched in 1998 with a retail price of $35. In today’s market, that would be between $70 and $100. By Christmas of that year, it was selling on the secondary market for $300, and people were having actual fistfights in toy stores over it.

Now, allow me to describe Furby, should you have never heard of it.

It had an infrared port so it could communicate with other Furbies and a microphone that was always on. It shipped speaking Furbish, a language its creators invented, and would gradually start using more English the longer you interacted with it.

It was the first mass-market consumer product that responded to you not when you pressed a button, but simply when you were there. It responded to sound, light, touch, and other Furbies nearby, and it had a memory that stayed active when you turned it off.

In 1998, this was unprecedented for a child’s toy. And the reaction to it tells you something interesting about people.

Parents reportedly felt watched by it. Kids said it seemed to know things it shouldn’t.

Nobody could fully explain why it was doing what it was doing, and that gap between what people understood and what they were experiencing is exactly where fear lives.

The rumor followed the product almost immediately. The claim was that Furby wasn’t just responding to sound — it was recording it and storing it.

Now, the microphone was real. The learning appeared real, even though it wasn’t. It was a scripted progression, with every Furby running through the same Furbish-to-English sequence regardless of what was said around it.

But parents watching their child’s Furby start speaking more English after weeks of interaction did not know that. They saw something that appeared to be learning from their family and from their own conversations inside their home.

That infrared port didn’t help the situation, either. Furbies communicated wirelessly with other Furbies.

Imagine that in 1998: My toy is transmitting data wirelessly.

That’s not something you heard in 1998, and understandably, it was alarming.

In 1999, the NSA officially banned Furbies from Fort Meade and other secure facilities. This was reported by the Associated Press, and the story spread nationally.

Tiger Electronics responded immediately: Furby has no ability to record, store, or transmit audio. The learning is scripted. It’s just a toy.

The NSA, though, kept the ban anyway, which is the intelligence community equivalent of a bouncer who doesn’t care that you’re on the list. The answer is still no, and the list doesn’t change that.

And that is the moment the rumor became indestructible.

Because when the most secretive intelligence organization in the world bans something from its buildings, hears the company’s denial, and still keeps the ban, that’s not bureaucratic overcaution in the public’s eyes. That’s confirmation.

Now, let’s go back to 1998 because it is a very specific year, and it matters to the story.

Google was founded in 1998. The internet stopped being a novelty and started becoming infrastructure.

Also in 1998, the Monica Lewinsky story broke, and it broke almost entirely because of information recorded without the subject’s knowledge. Private conversations becoming public record was front-page news throughout 1998.

The ECHELON program, involving the NSA and allied agencies monitoring global electronic communications, had been publicly reported since the mid-’90s. By 1998, it was an open secret. The government was listening to communications at scale, and everyone knew it.

Insert into that specific timeline a toy with an always-on microphone that appears to be learning from the people around it.

The fear wasn’t irrational. The target was wrong.

Those are two different things.

What could Furby actually do?

Its microphone detected volume and the presence of sound, not content. Loud or quiet, not words.

Its learning was based on a timer, not adaptation. There was no data storage, no audio log, and the infrared port only communicated basic state information to other Furbies. Things like, “I’m awake” or “I’m hungry.”

Dave Hampton was one of Furby’s creators, and he said in multiple interviews that the NSA ban was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the hardware.

But here’s the thing the NSA would say in response to that, and it’s difficult to argue with them.

Their concern was not that Furby was currently recording. It was that they couldn’t fully verify what it was doing.

In a secure environment, “We don’t think it records” is not the standard. “We have confirmed it cannot record” is the standard.

And in January 1999, that confirmation was not available quickly enough.

The NSA wasn’t paranoid. They were being the NSA.

Now, if you were concerned about Furby’s capabilities in the late ’90s, you weren’t going to like what was coming about 15 years later.

Fast-forward to 2013. Microsoft releases the Xbox One with a Kinect that was always on, always watching, and couldn’t be turned off.

Same fear, different device, 15 years later.

In 2015, Samsung’s smart TV policy warned users not to discuss personal information in front of the TV because voice commands were transmitted to third parties.

A corporation, in its own legal documentation, told customers their television might be listening.

That warning is essentially the Furby rumor from 1998, except this time it’s in the terms of service.

In 2017, WikiLeaks published documents showing the CIA developed tools to turn Samsung smart TVs into surveillance devices. The program was called Weeping Angel. The TVs appeared to be off, but they weren’t.

The Amazon Echo launched in 2014. An always-on microphone in your kitchen. Forty million units in four years. The same number as Furby, over roughly the same timeline, with a microphone that genuinely records and transmits audio to a company.

We were frightened of Furby in 1998. Then we put an Alexa in the kitchen and said, “That’s fine.”

It’s the same thing that happens when a new highway gets built through your town. You can fight it for years, and then it opens, and six months later you can’t remember how you got anywhere without it.

We normalized it.

The fear didn’t go away. We just got busy.

All right, let’s take a look at the Totally Unfounded scale.

One means completely made up. Ten means they’re hiding something, and we can prove it.

Furby gets a five.

Not because it was recording anything. It wasn’t.

But because the fear it generated turned out to be prophetic.

The thing people were scared Furby was doing in 1998 — an always-on microphone in your home collecting information about you without you fully understanding it — is just Tuesday now.

We’ve normalized it. We bought into it voluntarily.

The NSA saw it coming before we did.

They just had the wrong toy.

If you know somebody who owned a Furby or owns an Alexa, send this to them and stay skeptical.