Is Your Personal Data the Currency of 2019?
If you own an Amazon or Google device, regulate your home temperature through a smart thermostat, or keep your house safe with an app-controlled lock, here’s a hard dose of truth: Like millions of other consumers, your life is probably a clutter of voice-activated assistants, devices that make your existence easier, and platforms catering to your highly personalized tastes. Admit it: A sous vide cooker you can control from your iPhone while you’re at work is tempting, isn’t it?
But in 2019, it’s no secret you and I are paying a high price for the benefits our smartphones and the IoT confer. And as consumers, we’re being asked to pay in a new type of currency: our personal data. Imagine using dollars your whole life, then suddenly being handed an Indian rupee. Your attitude towards that unfamiliar piece of paper? Probably apathy. This goes a long way towards explaining the public’s collective shrug every time the media tells them they’re standing on the edge of a surveillance state abyss.
With ever greater frequency, we’re finding IoT devices often do more than they were billed to do. Spying on us is just one of those things. In the latest big tech personal data scandal on an endless conveyer belt of scandals, Google admitted that a microphone it had implanted in a Nest security device was “never supposed to be a secret” (emphasis mine).That was the second time Google had “accidentally” collected personal data from users. Accidentally, or accidentally on purpose?
The media has been reluctant to spell it out in black and white, but if you read between the lines, the implication is this: With every touchpoint we open to the Internet — FitBit, Google Home, Nest Thermostat, smart coffeemaker, wifi-enabled hearing aids—we might be voluntarily creating the dystopian future George Orwell predicted.
And I’m not being a sensationalist. This is already the reality in China, whose government has the authority to demand personal data at will from the Chinese analogues to America’s Facebook or Amazon. Like their American counterparts, these companies collect immense amounts of personal data. The government can also access private information from chat and email, as well as IoT devices. The output? China’s notorious social credit system: The most extreme use case for mass personal data collection.
Under the social credit system, Chinese citizens receive reputation scores, which are used to determine whether individuals are “qualified” to travel, attend private schools, have access to high-speed Internet, stay at hotels, etc. If you end up with a low score (say, because you engage in “vices” like excessive video gaming), you’re out of luck—so far, millions of Chinese nationals have been deemed “untrustworthy” based on social scores, which are calculated through complex algorithms based on personal data. Low scorers can be barred from traveling by air or train, participating in the securities market, buying premium insurance, and other activities.
If this reminds you of the dystopian universe depicted in Black Mirror, you’re not far off. In the West, only cinematic artists have been so bold as to draw IoT to its darkest—but not-far-from-reality—conclusion.
IoT is undeniably capable of many good things: Searing a steak, protecting our houses from burglars, alerting us to flooding, allowing us to order more toilet paper at the click of a button, monitoring the number of steps we take. But IoT sits on a spectrum. The sooner we understand the role we play in interacting with IoT, the better our chances of channeling this technology in the right direction.
Many of the personal data scandals of the past few years have been the result not just of consumer ignorance, but of big tech taking advantage of that ignorance. The key is to start at the source by turning our ignorance into awareness. The next time you buy an IoT device or download an app, realize you’re paying for that luxury not just in fiat currency, but also in the currency of your personal data. Are you willing to make the tradeoff?
