deal breakers for most people.
Let’s think about some
design challenges that must be
addressed to ensure continuing user trust in the home Io Ts
system: exception handlers
for sock drawers; incompatible sock releases; house virus
updates; and operating system
conflicts for merging households. And then there are the
open design questions: How are
you going to debug the house if
it decides to lock the bathroom
door with Auntie Elsie inside?
How do you negotiate with your
household IT administrator if
she is 13 years old and angry at
you for grounding her? And how
do these systems inter-operate:
What is in an effective decision-making hierarchy? Who gets to
have the last say? Think of the
power struggle if my applications are in conflict—my jeans
in conflict with my T-shirts
about which require my attention first. Anyone who has been
around children who are arguing can understand the power
struggles that come about
between somewhat independent, sentient, and opinionated
agents. And the question of all
questions: how many buttons
are there on an IoTs household
remote control?
Second, there is a stickier
problem—the reliability, consistency, credibility, and transparency of the network information transport; that is, the
possibility for data/information
leakage. Internet connections
are often insecure, spewing
data out and allowing others to
see our activities, intentionally
or by accident. The boundaries
between walls are permeable.
What if my sock resolutely, but
incorrectly, pairs with a sock
next door? And what if my
fridge starts putting my favorite foodstuffs on my neighbor’s
shopping list? Do I really want
them to know that my sophisticated palate requires at least
two jars of peanut butter a
week? The question is: Are my
sentient objects going to know
whom to share content with
and whom not to?
There may not be a malevolent entity using these data or
snarfing your bandwidth, but
even opportunistic information observers may enjoy this.
When I was growing up in the
U.K., there was a term for nosey
neighbors whose personal joy
is to research other people’s
personal lives: these curious
individuals are called “
curtain flickers”, known as such
because most of their observations took place by peering out
of their windows. One of the
advantages of curtain flicking
for the observed is that you
can see the movement of the
fabric indicating that you are
being watched. Nosey people
still exist, but these days their
options for snooping surreptitiously are so much greater.
Curtain flickers not need even
approach the window, so there
are few cues as to who is monitoring your actions.
Third, there is the thornier
problem of malicious attack
through deliberate and intentional hacks. The boundary
of bricks and mortar is easy
to see; unseen entryways are
more difficult. Marketers of
household cleaning products
have for years been warning us of unseen dangers like
germs and small creatures
that can enter our home; the
germs of tomorrow in the IoTs
world are going to be those in
service of humans with malicious intent. Frankly, once you
get malicious or self-interested
humans in the loop, all is likely
to go to hell. It is worse than
the days of yore, when shills
and confidence tricksters used
classic motivators—ego, greed,
avarice, lust, in fact, all seven
deadly sins—to trap us into giving away information that in
other circumstances we would
not share. Worse than these
kinds of social cons are unseen
attackers who steal personal
information like bank account
details and social security
numbers, without ever interacting directly with us. In these
cases we may not know for
some time about a breach.
The second and third aspects
of trust here revolve around
the permeable boundaries that
the Internet creates, and in the
home setting, that means a
whole new angle to perimeter
security. The perimeters of
the home have shifted, requiring new forms of vigilance.
Of course, this crossing has
been happening for some time
with TV shows downloaded to
TiVos and so on, but with newly
developing aggregated services
for living environments, more
people are crossing the residential gateway. These Internet-enabled agents who are hack-able and live in an integrated
world of data flows—where my
sensitive information resides—
make me feel vulnerable.
If you think I am being overly
conservative, picture this. It’s
a chilly evening, and as you
head to bed and snuggle down,
you feel safe in the knowledge
that the next morning will
bring a nice strong cup of cof-