The movement towards connecting everything you own and its mother to the internet to create one large cloud with absolute and utter control over your life, whilst also throwing security out the window, is the most ridiculous thing I have ever witnessed in tech. Not only are the tech guys pushing this, but the non-techy public is just blindly following. Madness.
This past summer, I was in an IoT/provenance reading group that discussed leading research and hot industry topics in the IoT area. Half of the reading group was composed of cloud storage and systems storage researchers, and the other half were IoT researchers. I was able to witness, first hand, the two major opposing arguments for IoT, from industry leaders on both sides. It was interesting for me to see because I never really gave the pro-IoT argument a chance, mainly because I think it's naive.
Spoiler alert: I still think it's naive.
Don't get me wrong, I do understand what pro-IoT people want. They see the Internet as the end-all, be-all, and they want to take advantage of the cloud. They see a house full of internet-capable devices as a house with a white picket fence. They want their devices to control themselves, to eliminate so-called menial and trivial everyday tasks that so many people are bored and bothered with.
When you get lazy, you also get stupid. And naive.
What the IoT supporters don't know is, if they let their devices control themselves, they are also letting their devices control their users. IoT people want everyday tasks to be abstracted, to be dealt with on their own. However, this requires the users to lose control. No matter how much power you think you have, if you are not managing something yourself, you really have zero control.
This trade-off is something IoT people either gloss over or actually don't see as an issue. But to others, this is a priority. Having control over your house, knowing what actually is going on, is the best way to achieve privacy and security. Relying on internet-enabled devices is like relying on an innocent young child to not be decieved by a stranger with candy.
As soon as you connect to the internet, you are freely giving away your data. Once your data is on the internet, it's on there forever. This happens every time you access the internet on your computer or your phone. When you have IoT devices all over your home, you are doing this infinity-fold. And even worse, most IoT devices have so few security measures in place that they don't even pretend to call themselves 'secure'. lol
You are basically asking to be hacked.
I know IoT is the hot new thing. Big data, data mining, IoT, etc. But to me, just because something is trending, doesn't mean I am willing to give up my privacy (lol tell that to the 14-year-old me that created a Facebook). I think to the general public, and even other tech people, IoT just sounds so cool and fresh and hip. The internet is all the rage. I think the consequences are often overlooked, and I think people don't really care what is happening under the hood. Abstraction, abstraction, abstraction. But I think there should be a point where take a step back and actually start making informed decisions. Ugh this is so annoying.
It used to take a nation-state to censor information on the Web — strongman regimes or agencies with spooky contacts in big ISPs. But if any script-kiddie can leverage IoT devices with hardcoded passwords to pull selected websites off the Net, the game has fundamentally changed.
If consumers were making an informed decision and that informed decision affected no one but themselves, perhaps we could let the matter rest. But neither of those conditions are true. Most consumers fail to appreciate the consequences of purchasing insecure IoT devices. Worse, such a quantity of insecure devices makes the Internet less secure for everyone.
At one level, it's hard to excuse the manufacturers for shipping a product of such intimate and personal use with such severe vulnerabilities. But at another level, it's hardly surprising. If Microsoft, Apple, Google, and other companies with core competencies in software struggle so mightily to secure their wares, it only stands to reason these relative newcomers to network connectivity would have even bigger challenges. Most IoT devices run a version of Linux that will be woefully out of date by the time it's in the homes of the people using it.