Should Children Form Emotional Bonds with Robots?

I think an important question here is this: who owns this robot? Because we're in the middle of a war on general purpose computation, where device and software manufacturers refuse to relinquish control over their products, instead retaining ownership from afar with DRM, patents and so on.

Is the child or their family free to modify this robot as they see fit? Are they able to inspect it to make sure it's not spying on them? It strikes me as very dangerous to form an "emotional bond" with a machine that serves someone else's interests over yours.

My favorite passage:

The idea is to create “a deeper and deeper emotional connection,” Sofman said. “And if you neglect [the toy robot], you feel the pain of that.”

When he told me this, I felt a flash of not-quite-anger. It seemed almost cruel to design a robot that could play on a young kid’s emotions. And I had never considered that, in the coming human–robot conflagration, robots might take over simply by expertly manipulating us into letting them win.