Recent technological advances have paved the way for an era of almost limitless imagination in the way we live our lives. The Internet of Things (IoT) is the embodiment of this phenomenon.What once felt like the stuff of science fiction is now here and it’s rapidly becoming the norm. These days, it’s not too difficult to imagine a world where our car talks to our thermostat as we drive home, ensuring we arrive to a warm house, or our fridge automatically re-orders milk whenever the supply is running low. But with so many aspects of our lives now going online, how can we enjoy the benefits it brings without losing our security, or our privacy?
Eve Maler, vice president Innovation & Emerging Technology, ForgeRock, discusses some of the key issues surrounding the rise and rise of the IoT.
1. How much is being invested in the IoT?
By one estimate, global investment in the IoT is expected to be 7.3 trillion dollars – yes, that’s “trillion” with a T – by 2017. Many companies are aggressively exploring new creative and collaborative IoT projects to gain a foothold in the market and make their businesses more competitive. For example, Apple made a big splash with the launch of its successful Apple Watch, which can be used not only for fitness purposes but also for medical research as well.
2. How will this growth impact on privacy?
As companies increasingly use the IoT to provide personalised services, people reasonably fear that their privacy may be compromised. The IoT faces unique challenges in this respect because organisations need to have access to users’ personal data in order to provide the services they are increasingly expecting. For instance, owners of the Samsung Smart TV were shocked to learn that its voice recognition capabilities involved “spying” on the (possibly) sensitive information in their utterances. People therefore feel they may have very little power to control what information is sharable.
At the same time, the privacy experience we’re used to when we use websites (i.e ticking a box that indicates we agree to share our personal data with a site) simply won’t do in the case of many IoT devices. Where is the tick-box on a smart light bulb? Even if a device comes with a companion app that can be installed on your smartphone, if the experts are right about how many IoT devices we’ll have in our lives soon, we’ll need a better way to deal with privacy.
3. How can the IoT continue thriving?
As more objects and appliances acquire the ability to “speak” to each other, businesses face the monumental task of ensuring that they can give people control of their personal data, even if that data is collected and managed in a thicket of millions of device-enabled networks. Consumers also want to control IoT data sharing so they can share it with family, friends, and others in an orderly and convenient fashion.
In order to succeed, IoT protocols must provide a cohesive approach to identity management that ensures the relationships between devices, people, and cloud services are properly built at the right moments; that they are based on fair privacy agreements; and equally importantly, that they are deleted when the relevant parties say so.
4. How can this be effectively governed?
A standards organisation called the Kantara Initiative sponsors several efforts, including the Identities of Things Discussion Group and the User-Managed Access (UMA) Work Group, to build solutions to these challenges. UMA is a new protocol designed to give users a unified point of control for authorising access to personal data and services, regardless of where those resources live online. An everyday example: if Alice owns an IoT-enabled “connected car,” she could introduce it to her UMA-enabled online sharing dashboard, where she could set up a sharing preference that lets her son Jacob drive the car — but not gain access to the boot. And her dashboard could handle data from everything from kitchen appliances to all her lightbulbs.
5. What can companies do to ensure they’re getting privacy right?
The most practical way to build in privacy is to use consistent, well-vetted open standards and platforms that enable secure, user-consented connections among devices, services, and applications. Once consumers feel they have control over their information, we will truly see the full potential of all that this technology can offer.
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