The Internet of Things poses a serious danger to privacy, writes Hamza Shaban in an article for The Verge. Reporting on the US Federal Trade Commission’s recent report, Shaban worries that the commission’s recommendations do not go far enough to protect consumers.
Shaban’s main concern is not usual issue of potential government abuse of new technology, but rather the insidious creeping of companies into our private lives, and the potentially harmful results that could arise from their harvesting of mass data. With an increasing plethora of connected devices providing unprecedented quantities of data on consumers’ daily lives and behaviour, and even their biological qualities, private companies will be able to engage with consumers as they never have before. Part of that will take the form of highly specific marketing – a practice that might be creepy, but isn’t necessarily harmful (And this isn’t a secret; one researcher interviewed by Shaban freely admits that his company, Ditto Labs, uses consumer habit data collected from digital pictures – “affinity data”, as he calls it – to more effectively target marketing efforts.)
