CHAPTER 4: TECHNOLOGY
internet and capable of communication without human intervention. As explained by
one journalist:
“In the World of the Internet of Things, your car, your heating system, your
refrigerator, your fitness apps, your credit card, your television set, your window
shades, your scale, your medications, your heart rate monitor, your electric
toothbrush and your washing machine to say nothing of your phone - generate
a continuous stream of data that resides largely out of reach of the individual.”38
A speaker at a Wilton Park seminar in November 2014 summarised the position as
being that in 1975 there were 1 billion connected places; in 2010 there were 5 billion
connected people; and that in 2020 there will be 50 billion connected devices. This
expansion will be enabled by the latest version of the Internet Protocol, IPv6, which
provides a far greater number of IP addresses than existed under IPv4.
4.34.
One already common use of IOT is in energy efficiency. An internet-enabled smart
thermostat adapts to its user’s behaviour patterns by recording energy usage, home
temperature, humidity, ambient light and nearby movement.39 Machine-to-machine
communications will make it increasingly difficult to know who owns particular data.
Smart meters also provide the potential for malicious disruption: this is the consumer
end of the more widespread scope for supervisory control and data acquisition attacks
on control systems. It has been suggested that adopting IOT without adequate security
will afford major opportunities for surveillance: in the words of Phil Zimmerman, “You
pay good money ... to turn your home into North Korea.”40
4.35.
The fastest growing category of IOT is wearable devices. Widely known examples
have included Fitbit and Google Glass, but these are just the tip of the iceberg of an
industry entering fields such as law enforcement and health. The wearing of body
cameras by police is currently being trialled across the UK and 2015 has been
predicted to be the year of wearable technology.41
Indeed, “Implantables,
embeddables and even ingestables are already emerging as the next wave of
wearable technology.”42 This is in line with one of the predictions made by technology
experts as to what the digital world will look like in 2025, namely, “augmented reality
enhancements to the real world input via portable, wearable and implantable
devices”.43 The scope for communication by new generations of medical devices
(pacemakers, hearing aids, etc.) is clear.
4.36.
IOT will lead to the growth in the volume of data, as data are generated on a continuous
basis from sensors in these connected devices. In this way, IOT will provide further
38
39
40
41
42
43
S. Halpern, “The Creepy New Wave of the Internet”, The New York Review of Books, 20 November
2014.
B. Schneier, Data and Goliath, 2015, chapter 1. The manufacturer, Nest, was bought by Google in
2014.
CPDP conference, “Crypto wars reloaded”, Brussels 21-23 January 2015,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcVj5LNwDa8 at 67 min.
“2015 gears up to be the year of wearable tech”, The Guardian, 25 December 2014.
A. Thierer, “The Internet of Things and Wearable Technology: Addressing Privacy and Security
Concerns without Derailing Innovation”, (2015) 21 Rich. J.L. & Tech. 6.
Pew Research Center, Digital Life in 2025, (March 2014). Augmented reality technology superimposes
a computer-generated image onto the real-world environment.
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