A father discovers his daughter is pregnant after credit card algorithms identify telltale patterns in her purchase data. Police charge a murder suspect based on evidence from a Fitbit tracker and a smart water meter. A man sues Uber for ‘telling’ his wife about an affair.
Stories like these are becoming more common these days, as the technologies involved become more integrated into our lives. They are part of the Internet of Things (IoT), embedding sensors and internet connections into the fabric of the world around us. Over the past year, these technologies have made their way into our homes in the form of smart devices that control everything in the home, including us.
On the one hand, the IoT serves justice. On the other hand, although we may not notice it, there is something much bigger going on behind the implementation of the Internet of Things: the desire to change the foundations of our daily lives and ensure total control.
Violation of social norms
IoT technologies want to be ubiquitous, seamlessly spanning the physical and virtual worlds and giving us unfettered control over it all. The Smart Home accurate mobile phone number list promises a future in which hidden technologies will provide us with services before we even realize we want them. This is done through motion sensors, water sensors, and more. The promise of the Smart Home includes near-infinite reach, optimal consumption, time-saving communication, and overall convenience, but all of this is completely incompatible with social realities.
The problem is that our lives are full of social constraints, and these constraints also manifest themselves in the home, where many IoT technologies are aimed. At first glance, our lives within the walls of the home may seem chaotic, but in reality, they are ordered. The home is a world in which we build boundaries with our household members and where hierarchy is emphasized: who is allowed into which rooms, who gets access to what information, with whom secrets are shared, from whom they are hidden.
Much of this is trivial, but such systems of order are indeed extremely important to us
When they are violated, we experience discomfort and feel irritation.
Smart home technologies are not good at recognizing the social boundaries and hierarchies we take for granted. They still make mistakes in 10 tips to win more consulting clients processing and transmitting data, and the cost of these mistakes is often high. They require significant fine-tuning, which is not always possible on your own.
Because of their inability to account for social boundaries and hierarchies, these technologies inadvertently attempt to change some of the important norms of our behavior at home. For example, how we live together with loved ones, limiting us in how we speak and how we act.
Thus, the placement of Smart Home devices in our apartments is a vast social experiment.
If the experience of using them proves too complex for our existing order, we will most likely simply abandon them.
That’s what happened with Google Glass, the cmo email list smart glasses with a built-in camera and heads-up display. It was too open to violating our notions of proper behavior. The discomfort even spawned the pejorative “glasshole” to describe its users.
There is no doubt that tech giants will continue to customize products with IoT technologies in the hopes of making them more convenient. Work is currently underway to create self-learning devices that will be smarter. However, the problem will always remain: how can we teach technology the complexities and nuances of our private world?
Under total control
In addition, smart home technologies collect personal, private information that can be access by hackers at any time. According to a report by the World Economic Forum, there are already more Internet-connect devices in the world than people, and it is prict that by 2025, 41.6 billion devices will collect data on how we live, work, move around, and operate and maintain our cars. All this private and often confidential information, falling into the hands of intruders, can lead to emotional losses and cause irreparable damage.
In fact, today we are hyper-connect, – says Dmitry Green, CEO and co-founder of the Almamat STEM school, expert of the SKOLKOVO IT cluster. – Today, there are two to three dozen sensors per person. A modern car has 500 sensors, a modern home has 600 sensors, a modern plane has 6,000 sensors. All this generates information. All our actions become more prictable and simplify “access to the body”. Interest parties do not necessarily have to spy on someone, it is enough to simply predict actions. And here the question of using this information arises acutely. Who, how and where will use it. In general, as the Internet of Things is used, the scale of its implementation and interaction of devices creates an unsafe environment that is vulnerable to leaks of personal data.
The World Economic Forum’s
Global Risks Report 2018 found that cyberattacks that were once considered large-scale are now considered the norm. Hackers have become more flexible. Their threats are becoming more sophisticated, using advanced technologies such as machine learning to launch attacks.
In recent years, there have been numerous issues related to how businesses and organizations handle their users’ information. IBM estimates that the cost of a data breach involving more than 50 million records is $350 million.
Cyber attacks and data fraud are a pressing issue for society. The Eurobarometer supports this conclusion: 87% of Europeans consider cybercrime a serious problem.
