Since we’re all spending so much time at home as a result of offices having been slow to re-open in many places, or people have opted not to return, we felt that it’s a good time to check in on the progress of the Internet of Things (IoT). Good place to start: this TED 2018 presentation on What your smart devices know (and share) about you. We’ve come a long way since then, baby – or at least technology has. Many of us are more or less stuck in our homes – and time to look at the data they’re collecting.

“There are smart lights, smart locks, smart toilets, smart toys, smart sex toys. Being smart means the device can connect to the internet, it can gather data, and it can talk to its owner.

“But once your appliances can talk to you, who else are they going to be talking to? I wanted to find out, so I went all-in and turned my one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco into a smart home. I even connected our bed to the internet. As far as I know, it was just measuring our sleeping habits. I can now tell you that the only thing worse than getting a terrible night’s sleep is to have your smart bed tell you the next day that you “missed your goal and got a low sleep score,” said Kashmir Hill, one of the two presenters, and a journalist who covers privacy and security for Gizmodo.

The reporter installed 18 connected devices and had them monitored (by fellow presenter and co-worker Surya Mattu) to understand what the home’s digital emissions look like to the internet service provider – and what they could sell you.

“We ran the experiment for two months. In that two months, there wasn’t a single hour of digital silence in the house — not even when (she and her husband) went away for a week,” she noted.

“The smart things you buy can and probably are used to target and profile you. Just the number of devices you have can be used to predict how rich or poor you are. Facebook’s made this tech, and they’ve also patented it.

“It’s easy to forget these things are watching you, because they don’t look like cameras,” Surya noted.

Intrusive much?

Once again, if the devices are listening for a wake word, they’re always listening. FYI, “do you know which device was especially chatty? The Amazon Echo. It contacted its servers every three minutes, regardless of whether you were using it or not,” said Surya.

Wake word or not, let’s face it: the echo is not an exception.

We do know that many employers are also now monitoring the computers of employees who are working remotely – an event that has been extended well into 2021, in many cases. Are those company-owned computers and if not, what other information are they collecting and is it any of their business to monitor peoples’ private lives? Potentially even more worrisome: can those employer-installed/provided monitors turn on cameras and microphones remotely? Without your knowledge or permission? We may be entering a very dark or rather, even darker era of tech, if this is the case, and what control do you have over it?

Whose device is this, anyway?

As the speakers mentioned in the TED Talk and what occurred to us as well as we were watching was that while in the internet era, so-called products like Facebook and Google were free, as it turned out, it was us who were the product. As Techcrunch reported, “Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, America’s roughly 640 billionaires have seen their fortunes soar by $845 billion in combined assets or 29% collectively, widening the already yawning gap between the very richest and the rest of the U.S.”

Considering that there are currently some 7.8 billion people in the world, well, that’s a lot of product.

Connected devices are something quite different. As Surya said “With the internet of things, it seems, even if you pay, you’re still the product. So you really have to ask: Who’s the true beneficiary of your smart home, you or the company mining you?”

It’s a given that connected devices are, well, connected in order for them to function, but why isn’t it more of a closed ecosystem? You purchased the device, it’s yours – as should be the information it’s gathering.

What to speak of hackers and we know that security is not top of mind with internet-based companies and that holds true for device manufacturers as well (This Hacked Coffee Maker Demands Ransom and Demonstrates a Terrifying Implication About the IoT).

“According to a survey by NPR and Edison Research, one in six American adults now has a smart speaker, which means that they have a virtual assistant at home,” Surya reported. We’re sure that the number is much higher by now, and that those people have even more connected devices.

As the technology ecosystem becomes even more invasive and sophisticated, particularly with the rise of the IoT, so should be the consumer. We have a tendency of charging headlong towards the latest tech without establishing the rules of the game. It’s not enough to shrug it off and say that our privacy is gone, anyway: with connected toilets and toothbrushes and sex toys, this is an invasion of into our most private of personal spaces, unchecked to date.

The New Age of Data

At the start, the internet was referred to as the information superhighway, but the idea was that people could have access to information, not that ours would be devoured instead.  The IoT takes the intrusiveness of tech many steps further and it’s time to step back – or unplug for now, until this is resolved – rather than allowing this behavior to perpetuate. With connected devices, time to renegotiate the consumer/tech relationship, especially in light of the price we paid for free. Connected devices are not only not free but come at a premium. Until there’s pushback, IoT providers and tech uberlords will continue to behave as if it’s business as usual when this is quite a different era and quite a different iteration of technology.

And therein lies the disconnect.

Onward and forward.