I’ve seen seven platform shifts in my lifetime, including the shift from mainframe to PC and the shift from desktop to mobile. With every shift, technology is getting closer to our skin—literally, given the wearables gracing many of our wrists. We are sharing information that is more personal and valuable—such as sleep patterns, health data, driving data, shopping habits and location—which companies are piecing together to create a mosaic of our individual lives. And they are doing so in the name of more personalized advertising.
At some point, people will balk at this loss of privacy, and that point is arriving quickly. In our latest MEF Global Consumer Trust Report, we learned that 36% of respondents reported online privacy and security concerns; 27% said privacy and security concerns prevent them from using apps; and 47% said they’d pay extra for a privacy-friendly app that guaranteed the data it collected would not be shared.
Contrast this sentiment of consumer concern with the Wild West atmosphere of the IoT. Companies are engaged in a massive, frenetic land grab in which access to the IoT and freedom to innovate are the prevailing values. In the Wild West, there was no principle of “privacy,” and even the idea of “security” as a human right was barely supported, depending on the whims of the local sheriff.
The IoT is similar, with speed, freedom and access as the chief values prioritized among hardware manufacturers and software companies. Everyone wants a piece of the IoT, but few are looking beyond their own homestead, to see what’s happening across the industry and to seek ways to ensure that the IoT remains a viable platform to deliver goods and services.
Now we’re faced with two roads—speed and trust—and they diverge. The road of speed is what we’ve been on—fast-paced innovation and growth in the IoT, which in itself has produced some pretty exciting technology. However, on this road we also find a lot of potholes and bad guys—ranging from legitimate commercial concerns that are inadvertently weakening the security of the IoT to learn more about consumers to full-fledged criminals who hack into systems to fulfil their desire for money and power.
In addition to direct breaches to secure credit card information, these criminals buy and sell intellectual property and private information—for example, information exploited from the Ashley Madison attack that can be used to blackmail targets. Health data is the next major target.
On the road of trust, it’s slower-going. Building the IoT sustainably requires industrywide participation and agreement upon standards. Companies will need to realize that they’re only as strong as the ecosystem they’re a part of, and that’s a tough mindset to adopt when you’re eagerly seeking a competitive advantage over everyone who crosses your path.
This week I addressed an audience at CES’s first-ever Cybersecurity Forum on this very topic. If attendees got only one thing from that talk, I hope it was that it’s up to us, the industry, to make the Internet of Things private and secure, and that will require a level of inquiry and accountability that we’re not accustomed to.
If you’re a device manufacturer or a software provider, think bigger and broader. Participate in standards groups; help define policies and start being part of a smart framework of the next-gen IoT.
As we go in to 2016, let’s tackle this challenge together. And in fact, there is no other way to tackle it. Hopefully, I’ll be standing in front of the crowd at next year’s CES celebrating our progress.
