By Gordon Hull
The expansion of the Internet of Things is going to provide a lot playspace for highly intensive and granular corporate surveillance – which is to say it’s going to be a catastrophe for privacy. Sure, sure, everything will come with a “click here to accept” or comparable “notice and consent” privacy policy that “empowers” individuals to make a rational decision about whether their fridge should communicate with their grocery store when they are running low on milk. But as Allesandro Acquisti and coauthors note:
“Uncertainty and context-dependence imply that people cannot always be counted on to navigate the complex trade-offs involving privacy in a self-interested fashion. People are often unaware of the information they are sharing, unaware of how it can be used, and even in the rare situations when they have full knowledge of the consequences of sharing, uncertain about their own preferences. Malleability, in turn, implies that people are easily influenced in what and how much they disclose. Moreover, what they share can be used to influence their emotions, thoughts, and behaviors in many aspects of their lives, as individuals, consumers, and citizens. Although such influence is not always or necessarily malevolent or dangerous, relinquishing control over one’s personal data and over one’s privacy alters the balance of power between those holding the data and those who are the subjects of that data.”
Indeed, one strongly suspects that’s the point.
In the meantime, Burger King ran an ad that tried to trick Google Home into running a search for the Whopper. And now there’s this:
“High-end models of Roomba, iRobot’s robotic vacuum, collect data as they clean, identifying the locations of your walls and furniture. This helps them avoid crashing into your couch, but it also creates a map of your home that iRobot is considering selling to Amazon, Apple or Google.”
That’s right: if you have one of those robot vacuum cleaners, it might very well be constructing a highly granular map of your home that will be able to interpret things like what kinds of furniture you have and whether (and how many) kids you have, and so forth. Expect targeted ads to follow if the data leaves the Roomba.
Oh, and depending on how courts interpret third party doctrine, that detailed interior map of your home may be freely available to law enforcement. As Justice Sotomayor warns, “it may be necessary to reconsider the premise that an individual has no reasonable expectation of privacy in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties” in the “digital age.”
In the meantime, I recommend a broom.
Recent Comments