"Smart Devices Spy on You – 2 Computer Scientists Explain How the Internet of Things Can Violate Your Privacy"
Computer scientists Robert Yus and Primal Pappachan from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Penn State University explain how Internet of Things (IoT) devices can violate users' privacy. They emphasized that the expansion of Internet connectivity to devices in homes, offices, and cities has put privacy in more danger. In addition to IoT devices in the home, such devices are increasingly becoming widely used in transport, farming, and industrial automation, with the number of IoT devices projected to grow to more than 50 billion by 2020. Smart devices collect various types of data about their users. Smart security cameras and smart assistants are essentially cameras and microphones that collect video and audio information about a user's presence and activities. IoT devices such as smart TVs use cameras and microphones to spy on users, while smart lightbulbs track sleep and heart rate, and smart vacuum cleaners identify objects in the home and map them. This surveillance is sometimes advertised as a feature. For example, some Wi-Fi routers can gather information about where a user is in their home and coordinate with other connected devices to sense motion. Manufacturers generally promise that humans cannot see data; only automated decision-making systems can. However, this is not always the case since Amazon workers listen to some conversations via Alexa to transcribe and annotate them before feeding them into automated decision-making systems. Limiting access to personal data to automated decision-making systems can have consequences as any private data shared over the Internet may be vulnerable to hackers, and few consumer Internet-connected devices are highly secure. Users have the option of occasionally turning IoT devices off for privacy, but even with this option, disconnecting the devices from the Internet can significantly impact their usefulness. Users may not have this option in the workplace, at the mall, or in smart cities, so they are vulnerable even if they do not own the smart devices. Therefore, it is essential to help users make informed decisions by increasing awareness of the trade-offs between privacy and comfort when purchasing, implementing, and using IoT devices. Regulations such as the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are an important step. Still, their enforcement will probably take a while to catch up with the constantly growing number of IoT devices. This article continues to discuss the researchers' thoughts on how IoT devices pose a threat to users' privacy and how users can secure such devices and minimize risks to privacy.