On December 16, Senators Marsha Blackburn and Richard Blumenthal sent a letter to toy companies demanding answers about AI-powered toys. In it, they describe a teddy bear called Kumma that, when asked “what is kink?” responded with a list of sexual fetishes and described roleplay scenarios between teachers and students, and even a parent and child. The same bear gave step-by-step instructions on how to light a match and where to find knives.

These products are marketed to toddlers. The FBI has warned parents about connected toys. And millions of them are already wrapped and waiting for children under trees right now.

So this is a last-minute gift guide for people who’d rather not wrap a liability. 

For your kid (or your sister’s kid) who melts down sometimes: Skip the “emotional wellness” apps that build psychological profiles of how children respond to stress, what frustrates them, and where they’re vulnerable. Those apps sit in a legal gray zone,  governed by children’s privacy laws written in 1998, before AI could infer your child’s inner life from how they tap a screen to how many milliseconds they spend on a social media video. Give Mightier instead, a biofeedback video game where kids wear a heart rate monitor while playing. When their heart rate spikes, the game gets harder. To win, they have to learn to calm down. It doesn’t build a profile of your kid for some company’s database or to drive unhealthy screen use by children. Their privacy policy clearly states that they don’t “sell, share, or otherwise disclose your personal Information” without your permission. And it’s a program that builds skills, in particular interoception, the ability to notice and regulate what’s happening inside your own body. Instead of giving surveillance, you’re giving emotional intelligence. 

To the stressed-out person in your life: The wellness wearable market is a privacy disaster, with heart rate, sleep patterns, stress levels, and even menstrual cycles, all collected with fewer federal protections than your video rental history. (Congress really did pass a law for video rentals. It hasn’t passed one to protect your biometric data.) The Apollo Neuro doesn’t track anything. Instead of extracting data from your body, it sends gentle vibrations that activate your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the “rest and digest” response. Their research shows real improvements in stress resilience. Which means that you’d be giving someone a tool that helps them regulate their stress and heart rate variability, rather than a device that watches them struggle or causes them to do so.

For the kid who wants to learn to code: Be careful. Many AI-powered tutoring apps “personalize” learning by building detailed cognitive models of how your child thinks, such as where they hesitate, what frustrates them, or how they handle failure. That’s valuable data, and the company keeps it. COPPA doesn’t regulate AI inference, and it doesn’t cover teenagers at all.

For a genuinely private alternative, which is both affordable (free!) and science-backed, give them the gift of Scratch, which is MIT’s visual coding platform. Children learn computational thinking through creative projects, building real skills, all while the company never sees how their mind works. The online community version does collect data (username, country, birth date, email, and uses cookies and analytics), but I trust them with it more than some companies. 

Of course, KiwiCo and Kano, and Crunch Labs kits are even simpler, since they are physical STEM projects and build-your-own-computer kits that arrive by mail, don’t involve screens, do not collect any personal data, and teach kids to be creators rather than consumers of technology.

For the person who asked for a ChatGPT subscription: Generative AI is genuinely useful, but every conversation trains the model and feeds a system with unresolved questions about privacy and consent. A safer bet is to give that person tools that build creative capacity without legal asterisks, like beautiful art supplies, a quality notebook, or the Day One journal app with end-to-end encryption so no one can read what they write. You’re giving them creativity that’s unambiguously theirs.

For the person who wants a smart speaker: Smart speakers are always-listening devices whose recordings may or may not have constitutional protection. Courts are still sorting out whether the Fourth Amendment applies when you’ve “voluntarily” shared audio with a corporation. Give a great board game instead. Wavelength sparks conversations people actually remember. Codenames works for any age, and Pandemic lets you save the world together. With these, you’re giving presence and connection, rather than a microphone with uncertain legal status.

But here’s the thing: the gift that will matter most will cost you nothing at all.

When the wrapping paper is flying and the kids are more interested in boxes than what came in them and someone’s definitely about to spill the eggnog, you’re going to be tempted to grab your phone to capture the moment, to document the chaos for posterity, or to post on Instagram.

Don’t do it.

Researchers have now well documented the “photo-taking impairment effect,” and how when you photograph an experience, your brain outsources the memory to the camera and keeps less for itself. Across studies from museums, to concerts, to family events, people who photograph remember less than people who simply watch. So live in the moment, don’t just photograph it.

Give your people the thing that can’t be purchased at any price, which is your complete attention, fully present, actually seeing them.

Your memory will be richer because you weren’t outsourcing it, and you’ll have given the one gift no algorithm can replicate, which is the experience of being truly seen by someone who chose to be present.

You’ve got precious little time to buy those last-minute gifts, and with every click, you’re making  a choice about the kind of gift-giver you want to be. Do you want to be the kind who defaults to whatever Amazon recommends? Or the kind who thinks about what they’re actually giving, and what it asks of the people who receive it?

You already know the answer. Now go be that person.