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Internet of Things Demands New Social Contract To Protect Privacy

Posted by samzenpus on from the don't-harvest-my-data-bro dept.

chicksdaddy writes "Changes brought about by the Internet of Things demands the creation of a whole new social contract to enshrine the right to privacy and prevent the creation of technology-fueled Orwellian surveillance states in which individual privacy protections take a back seat to security and 'control.' That, according to an opinion piece penned by the head of the European Commission's Knowledge Sharing Unit. Gérald Santucci argues that technology advances, including the advent of wearable technology and the combination of inexpensive, remote sensors and Big Data analytics threaten to undermine long-held notions like personal privacy and the rights of individuals."

3 of 95 comments (clear)

  1. Here's a contract for you by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I reserve the right to disable the network connection and recording capabilities of any device in a public space with sensors capable of detecting or inferring my presence.

    1. Re:Here's a contract for you by Electricity+Likes+Me · · Score: 4, Funny

      So your plan is to go around to a lot of private businesses disabling their security cameras?

      Probably should help yourself to the till while you're at it - you know, compensation for the effort.

  2. Even open source has tracking and back doors now. by Animats · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We need to be much less tolerant of things that "phone home" to some headquarters. Or accept remote patches. We now have to assume that anything with a remote patch capability can be exploited.

    You might think open source would be better. It's not. Even the Mozilla Foundation has become squishy-soft on enforcing their own privacy rules. Check out BlockSite, a Firefox add-on which used to just block requested sites. It was bought up by a company called WIPS, which buys up abandoned apps and puts in back-door tracking of every site visited. After a year of pressure from WIPS, Jorge Villalobos at Mozilla caved in and let them install tracking in an existing add-on and auto update it.

    For Linux, Ubuntu pushes an awful lot of updates to supposedly "stable" versions. Is there a back door in there? Is anybody looking?