Internet of Things, Privacy and Ethics: Is there any privacy at all when the whole world is connected?
Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm that enables the communication between electronic devices and sensors through the internet in order to facilitate our lives, where it uses smart devices and the internet to provide innovative solutions to challenges and issues . At its core, IoT is about embedding advanced connectivity and intelligence in physical devices to make them smarter and more responsive, thus enhancing their utility and functionality. As IoT continues to expand, it promises to revolutionize various sectors including healthcare, domestic use, and urban planning, creating opportunities for more integrated, efficient, and sustainable practices. With the current speed of expansion, it’s estimated to rise to over 75 billion connected devices.
As you might have seen or even used before, those smart home devices ranging from Amazon Alexa, or Apple HomePod, to smart fridges, or smart switches, they’re all part of the IoT family. The smart thermostats can adjust the temperature based on your habits and preferences, learning automatically to optimize heating schedules to save energy. Smart lights can be controlled via smartphone apps or voice commands, allowing for easy adjustments in brightness and colour to suit different moods or activities. Additionally, for connected security systems, including cameras and motion sensors, offer homeowners peace of mind by providing real-time surveillance and alerts.
There are also wearable healthcare IoT devices as well, such as smart watches and fitness tracker. They typically monitor the heartrate, frequency, and intensity of movements, even to analyse the ECG (electrocardiogram) of the wearer. Not only these can offer the wearer an insight into their own health status and trend, but also it can warn them earlier on potential illnesses. With such connected technology, it motivates the wearer to exercise more, bringing in unintentional health benefits, such as closer calorie tracking. The wearer can keep track of their heart rate during a cardio exercise, for example, to achieve optimal cardiovascular stress and calorie burn. This also enables the delivery of personalised healthcare, as medical doctors can now obtain a more wide-ranging and longer duration. With more data available, family doctors can tailor their treatment down to the level of the individual, rather than the general demographic group of the patient. This can create more accurate healthcare and treatments in which patients can enjoy an improved treatment outcome.
On the surface, it all seems rosy, with many promises abound, and seemingly not a lot of drawbacks.
But with so much data being amassed, it calls for a further examination of the handling of the data, as well as who and how it’s being and will be used. There is a growing concern for the way that the data is used, which raises significant questions. On the smart home device front, how do we know companies are not spying on us? Most of the smart home hub devices, such as Amazon Alexa, sends not only light and proximity sensor data but also voice data onto the cloud for processing. While Amazon assured customers that the data is encrypted and it will only record when the trigger word “Hey Alexa” is called, there is little outside scrutiny that this was ensured. They also didn’t prohibit sharing your data to 3rd party advertisers by default. Many of the privacy settings are by default turned off. It is up to the user to opt out of policies and settings that are privacy invasive. The responsibilisation of the consumer on securing their own privacy is very prevalent. Moreover, there is a possibility that the device can mis-heard the trigger word, and begin recording, without the notifying the consumer. There is also one more loophole, the manufacturers alleges that the recording of user voice data only starts after the trigger word is heard. But to hear the trigger word, the device must be recording at all times, otherwise there’s no way for the device to know that the trigger word was said. This feature of always listening for the trigger word is not only featured on smart home devices, it also is installed on many modern smartphones running Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, in virtual assistants like Siri or Google Assistant respectively. This raises a privacy risk to the individual using such devices, which they might not be aware of such behaviour occurring.
On the health care front, there’s the issue of cybersecurity. The data collected are often sensitive data. By being able to track your heart rate and even analyse your ECG, the ramifications will be serious if there’s a data breach due to cyberattack. If these data were to fall into the hands of bad actors, the personal privacy will be significantly threatened. The bad actors can potentially sell this data to other data brokers, which then can be used to profile you the individual and be used for ransom. The individual will be forced to pay the ransom because the health data is unique to the individual and irreplaceable. Health insurance companies can also leverage this data to provide discriminatory insurance premiums.
There is another concern on relying of the wearable technologies for precision or predictive medicine — accuracy. There are numerous research showing high discrepancy of accuracy between devices. This could lead to the wrong diagnosis being taken or the wrong treatment being given. The health ramifications are significant, since the wrong treatment could further aggravate the health problem. Additionally, there are also the annoyance and anxiety caused to the user when the device has a false positive detection. According to news reports, this is a common occurrence for Apple Watch users. This causes undue stress and confusion to users, and it could potentially cause warning habituation, where future genuine warnings would go unheeded by the user. It raises the ethical question of should a company be releasing and advertising devices that they claim to issue medical warnings and health data tracking when the results are not always unreliable.
Therefore, the rise of IoT can be beneficial in both convenience at home and personal health aspects, but there are many privacy and ethical problems too. The shortcoming of such devices should be made aware and even potentially be regulated.
Reflection of the course unit
Reflecting on the whole course unit, I believe I have had my horizons expanded, knowledge deepened, despite my degree has given me an account of the underlying technicalities. For this reflective section, I will be using the Kolb’s Experiential Learning Cycle to structure my experience.
Before I began this course unit, I have a relative understanding of the digital world, owing to the fact that my degree, IT Management for Business, has educated me on some of the basics of IT. I also had some sort of understanding with the business side, on why businesses should use certain ICT products and solutions. I understood in general about the Internet, and AI. And I have heard about the term Internet of Things before, but I didn’t know too much about it. I saw Digital Society from the lens of businesses and technical experts.
Throughout the unit, I learnt a lot more about the history of Internet of Things, and how it came to be what it is today. This encouraged me to explore more about the area and eventually decided to use IoT and its related topic smart cities as part of my dissertation topic for my course. Another aspect I didn’t thought of was the construction of gender in the digital spaces. I didn’t notice anything strange about gender bias in the digital spaces, despite myself questioning my gender.
Reflecting on the reason why I didn’t think about gender, it could partially be my exposure to binary genders in general, and the lock-in of the gender discourse in society. From the use of a female voice for virtual assistants, we have been conditioned to expect a virtual assistant (VA) should be of the female gender. However, when we hear a male voice in a VA, we immediately trust that VA more. It’s also shown that we are more prone to get emotional and angry with a female presenting VA, possibly due to our societal gender biases and inequality.
As for the Internet of Things and Smart City, I didn’t think about it in particular is possibly due to the prevalence of it in the modern society. It seems to blend in and became normalised with the other objects of interaction that we interact with daily. Having born into this digital generation, it is easy to forget that the idea of Internet of Things and Smart Cities came a long way, from the analogue era to the digital era.
Finally, as for my takeaways, I would say I will take my learnings of gender biases into work, where I will consider my assumptions more critically, especially on the gender front. For IoT and Smart Cities, I shall be more curious about the history of systems and acknowledge the analogue past.
#digisoc3
