THE COST OF INTERNET OF THINGS

By Marta Lo Bracco


What do 1984 of George Orwell, The Truman Show and the infamous BigBrother reality Show have in common?


They all describe a dystopian society where privacy is not a thing of this world, or worst it has been taken away without the main character’s consent (the Truman show) or has been imposed with brutality (1984) Or it’s a fun thing to watch to unplug our brains.





Reality is not going so much further from what we have only seen in Movies or Books.


Are we entering a surveillance era? Is this the real cost, the price we pay for this continuous stream of free information and entertainment?





There are approximately 30 billions devices connected to the internet at the moment, and they are only growing in number. They can go from a “simple” computer to your doorbell, from your dildo, to your kid’s toy.


It’s easy then to feel that we are being spied on. Is it just paranoia or truth? One thing it’s known for sure, all these companies are collecting everything they can, but very few of them know how to use or properly store the data they have collected, so this gives us a span of time to act and regulate. Which is happening, for example, recently the state of California has issued the CCPA which has an impact not only in california, but pretty much everywhere, because sometimes the cost of differentiation per single user instead of just applying the same law more broadly can be high.


So yes, we definitely are surveilled and this is the price that we currently have to pay in order to have a broad range of internet-connected devices that are capable of communicating with other devices and networks, which of course it enhances functionality with relatively modest hardware capabilities. So we then get higher performances but our data travels faster and is collected on a bigger scale. And our feeling of unfairness increases while we are overpaying with our data for a service currently facing potential security threats.


It is important to ask ourselves those itchy questions, which will inevitably lead to one bigger issue: is it fair to regulate new technologies and devices while they are being launched or will it destroy their market capabilities?


The answer might be simple, and needs to bring us one step behind, we need to think about the consequences, especially now that pretty much everything we can imagine can be created, and interconnected. We have to think where the consequences will fall on. Or on who.


Regulation is important wherever the consequences might become a threat to our security, so as our data is travelling faster and wildly, it is important to understand that security, data and privacy are three links of the same chain of our new IoT life.

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