May is a weak statement

I have reviewed the text “Ethical Design in the Internet of Things” by Gianmarco Baldini, Maarten Botterman, Ricardo Neisse, Mariachiara Tallacchini.

The text introduces a concept to deal with the needs and rights to privacy for the users of IoT devices. The concept is called Ethical Design. The authors present a framework to implement Ethical Design, the framework is called SecKit and is it already developed in Neisse et al. (2015) and Neisse et al. (2014a). The frameworks aim is to find a way to deal with the privacy of the users of IoT devices in a structured fashion.

My critique

In general the text lacks sources to back up the claims, I have a few examples in the part below.

- The opening line “Public awareness of privacy risks in the Internet has increased” according to who? I would claim otherwise, but I do not have any sources to back up my statement, other than my own experience. I have been working with web analytics for more than a decade and I am still surprised by the lack of understanding about how much information people are willing to give away (my self included).

- The authors write on page 11 in last paragraph: “The Ethical Design may bring a number of advantages :”, yes it may do a lot of things, but is not. May is weak a statement and needs to be backed up by a stronger statement.

- The authors intention seems very clear, and maybe too clear. I would have liked to also read about the problems with this solution, from the authors point it seems like this is the best solution, but it is not clear why. I have some questions that there were not addressed; like is there any problems with the security of this system? It seems like a very complex solution to the problem?