What if everyone had an IoT doorbell?
I’m not yet ready to report results from my IoT doorbell experiment but have been thinking some about what a world full of IoT doorbells might be like, other than, possibly, less noisy.
An IoT doorbell falls into the category of “Consumer IoT,” that is IoT gadgets made for (and sometimes by) private individuals to own and operate. My doorbell is primitive (and, to be honest, not working very well) but some Consumer IoT devices, for example, the popular Nest products made by Alphabet, are extremely sophisticated, featuring multiple sensors, actuators, and advanced Artificial Intelligence in the processing loop.
All Consumer IoT products have this much in common: you are the target audience and these products are sold on that basis. What good will a Nest thermostat do you, personally and individually? That is what Nest expects you to consider when shopping.
But Nest isn’t selling a thermostat to you alone; there are tens of millions of them installed in homes like yours already, along with Nest smoke detectors and surveillance cameras. There may be Nest devices in your neighbor’s house, or in the apartment downstairs. Whether or not you think about all those other installations, Nest certainly does.
Consumer products, produced by the million, are often designed as if they were meant to be used by but a single consumer. Think of car alarms, designed to generate the most obtrusive noise possible, and succeeding to such a degree they came near destroying the urban environment before everyone realized of what little practical use they were even to the car owners themselves.
For IoT products, though, the intention is exactly the opposite: they are designed to be one among millions, to be used by you and your neighbor, and for all that use to be analyzed together.
I built a single doorbell, but what if all doorbells, when rung, communicated that action to the Internet? Could we measure the population implosion of Detroit by the drop in volume in this data stream? Does doorbell activity measured across a large enough area correlate to sociability within a community, or to poverty levels? Can I detect in the ringing patterns of contiguous apartments evidence of someone trying to gain illicit entrance via the lobby door? It might be feature, it might be security flaw, but once these things are deployed en masse new combinations will arise. And that’s exactly the point: it’s the Internet of Things, not Thing.
Some of these doorbells-in-their-millions use cases may seem trivial, but similar ones may be of real social or commercial value where, say, an IoT smoke alarm is concerned. Shouldn’t we harness the data from millions of smoke alarms to better understand the fire hazards in the average home? Won’t we want to use that data to improve emergency services response times? Or, as likely, might Nest not want to sell data from homes with frequent alarms to, say, toaster manufacturers?
We’re used to Internet companies commercializing the data generated by our online activities. When we use Facebook or Google we go, virtually, to their platforms, so it seems a natural, perhaps inevitable deal: I use your service, you get to watch me do it…and to sell what you learn about me and my fellow users to others. With the consumer IoT we’re inviting these companies into our homes, our cars, our clothes and beds (consider this just-released study by Jawbone). It’s there in the terms of service, where you’re not likely to notice it: you bought our thing, we get to watch you use it…and more.
