Mac's musings: "Privacy risks
Privacy risks are present everywhere where we have sensing technologies in IoT. It will often be possible to correlate the sensing with an individual’s activities.
You can expect to see this data used in unexpected ways – the court case involving FitBit data is a sign of a trend where IoT data can be used as evidence of a person’s innocence or guilt.
Mitigations could include strong encryption, ephemeral data or only maintaining statistical and aggregated data in the longer term.
Many IoT devices also have the ability to actuate and affect the physical world – so what could possibly go wrong? Human safety checks are absent when moving to automation in IoT. We will need to design with safety in mind as everyday domestic objects become known killers – whether automatic door openers or even something as mundane as a venetian blind.
Picking up the theme of care for the elderly in their homes, again from a previous blog, we also start to see the need for resilience in our IoT designs. A particularly dangerous episode for many elderly people is a power outage – from the heating stopping, to lack of lighting, leading to increased risk of falls or other accidents.
Resilient IoT design
A resilient IoT design would include several hours of protected power supply for the sensors and router; backup communications using 3G as the ADSL or cable modem may not be available to access the internet (fixed line telecoms operators are required to have the phone service available during a power outage, not the broadband); and the ability to act independently of internet servers to raise alarms, so that operations are maintained when there are network and server failures or DDOS attacks on the infrastructure.
To build an IoT we trust we must first learn to handle the risks. Importantly, while showing damages in privacy cases has proven hard, the rise in citizens injured by devices will rapidly lead to product liability cases." 'via Blog this'
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