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| Spambot with actual spam |
In some of the news that I monitor this week, there was talk of white hat hackers taking advantage of security holes in the background browsers of Internet-connected televisions, with Nefarious Potential to follow. (Your appliance may already be a spambot!)
The TVs now come with cameras and microphones as part of their rigging, so the set can (a) save energy by dimming or turning off when you leave or fall asleep, or (b) monitor your attention for marketing and advertising purposes, because offline and online is eventually all going to be one.
But let's not get sidetracked. Remember, we're going to the dishwasher.
As most Internet of Things (IoT) devices tend towards economically friendly browsers like open source and Linux, hacks are easy and updates are intermittent. The entire situation has the potential to scuttle the industry before it really gets off the ground, especially if media and/or litigation decides to make a lunch of it, and, well, that's certainly possible. If for no other reason than there is a lot of venture capital / deep pockets in the IoT space.
Which all sounds a lot more dire than I'd like to make it, if only for the following factors.
1) Privacy skews at a demographic level. People who have grown up with connected everything have also grown up with cynicism, incessant trolling and social media that has always acted as a race to the most shared. These are also the folks who are going to buy the new stuff. Privacy enhancement isn't going to move gear, at least not in comparison to price and features, and as long as the IoT gear does things that the consumer finds to be of value, they'll trade off privacy in a heartbeat. They have for, well, decades.
2) Legislation isn't likely to happen. We live in an era where consumer-unfriendly measures like an end to net neutrality are going to provide all kinds of air cover to the IoT, as if much will get done in the polarized and charged environment that seems to be the new normal in the U.S. For something as esoteric as the privacy settings on niche gadgets, this will be a golden era of being able to hide in plain sight.
3) When there's big money on the table, *always* bet against crime. A few years ago, I was extremely concerned about fraud in the display ad business, since the work could be done anywhere in the world, and all of the solutions to the problem seemed to require an unrealistic amount of human bandwidth. (My livelihood was also tied up entirely in display.)
What has happened since is that the problem, while still a major concern, has likely crested and started to recede, because Facebook and Google threw a lot of resources at it, and the rest of the industry followed the leaders. Most estimates have the majority of fraud done by a few high volume actors, which means, in all likelihood, that the net is closing in on those folks.
There's still an unacceptable number of bad actors out there, and the situation needs to get better, but it's already on the way. IoT hackers are going to have a lot of talented people trying to take them out of the game, and more will come every day. Oh, and the very best hackers will also switch over from black to white hat coding, since you can do the same work but turn it into a stable career, rather than worry about, well, prison.
At the start of a new industry, the value proposition will always seem small, and maybe even a little ridiculous. Why would anyone want their refrigerator to be connected to the Internet, especially if it adds to the cost of the unit and contributes to a security issue? But when the connectivity creates a device that self-repairs based on remote monitoring, informs (or auto-replenishes) a shopping list in ways that makes life easier, alerts the user to when produce is about to spoil, or self-corrects energy expenditure when the unit isn't being used as much, all of which saves the user money?
Well, all of that is going to be something you won't want to do without, once you have it. There will be bumps in the road, and those who choose to do without. Kind of like every tech advancement ever, or (hey! we got here after all!) kind of like when dishwashers started turning up in kitchens.
The new ones do all kinds of stuff the old ones don't do. They are dramatically better than the one we got rid of, for less money than the old one cost. The tech that's inside the unit has all kinds of sensors and gadgetry, and we have become (damn near instantly) used to the new level of service.
Oh, and in the store where we got this, they put the dishwashers next to the fridges. Which had models with digital whiteboards and browsers, next to the models that didn't.
Guess which ones got all of the foot traffic?
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