continuous negotiation with the Io Ts and with the network providers who control them is going to make me tense or tired or both. All this makes me want to jump headlong into a research agenda centered on infrastructure policy and on network security, and to actively promote a view of the IoTs world in terms of socio-technical, emotional networks of trust, reliability, and confidentiality. Not simply a world of consumer devices, simple and innocent nodes in the networks within and between which digital information flows. Right now, when thinking about the strong IoTs hypothesis at least, I am inclined to agree with J.K. Rowling’s character Arthur Weasley in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when he said, “Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

On a positive note, there are new employment opportunities here: interior home integrators, managed home Internet services, remote Internet locksmiths, thing-programming specialists, and thing therapists specializing in human and device family and couples counseling.

fee to break the day. But, in a hilariously titled online June 2008 entry, “All Your Coffee Are Belong To Us,” Slashdot posted the following: “Craig Wright discovered that the Jura F90 Coffee maker, with its honest-to-God Jura Internet Connection Kit, can be taken over by a remote attacker, who can cause the coffee to be weaker or stronger; change the amount of water per cup; or cause the machine to require service. Best yet, the software allows a remote attacker to gain access to the Windows XP system it is running on at the level of the user. An Internet-enabled, remote-controlled coffee machine and XP backdoor—what more could a hacker ask for?”

Whether this coffee pot hack actually ended up causing people problems or not, I don’t know; I could not find any follow-up stories. But the unwitting Internet-enabled home device as a Trojan horse is surely something we can all imagine. One response to this is that we need to educate users—or better still, let’s just insist that users “be more careful.” Not going to happen. It is a strange thing that although we see the Internet as a risky place, we do not take steps to protect ourselves. Study after study shows that people do not secure their wireless home networks. And you only need to spend 20 minutes on social networking sites to find out way too much about a person—information that could help you breach the confidentiality of their personal data. Finding out a whole heap of stuff about a person is really easy with just a little technical expertise; most famously,

Sarah Palin, the running mate of defeated John McCain in the 2008 election had her email hacked—her password and security questions were easily guessed from information available on the Internet.

Trust is fostered through reliability, predictability, transparency, assurance, and insurance—and it is a moving target in the design of all evolving complex systems. Perhaps nowhere more so than in the upcoming IoTs world. This IoTs world is going to involve a lot more emotional engagement with data devices. We will be increasingly intimate with our semi-sentient devices; we will weave them into our lives and entrust information to them— probably more than we entrust our data to social networking sites, which we expect to safeguard our precious data. And we are more likely to feel emotionally distraught and betrayed when we discover breaches. The affective bonds that we develop with these interactive things will likely mean that models of vigilance, which assume dispassionate security practices and emotionally uninvolved risk assessments, will be even more challenged. These models get stymied by trusted “friends” with access to our information. Conversely, these models do not account for the betrayal we feel when our interactive helpers allow themselves to be hacked. We can of course treat our things like children, expecting their boundary setting capabilities to be at about the level of a 5 year old. But that does not seem like the right model.

In any case, I suspect that

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Elizabeth Churchill is a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research leading research in social media. Originally a psychologist by training, for the past 15 years she has studied and designed technologies for effective social connection. At Yahoo, her work focuses on how Internet applications and services are woven into everyday lives. Obsessed with memory and sentiment, Churchill research-es how people manage their digital and physical archives. Churchill rates herself a packrat, her greatest joy is an attic stuffed with memorabilia.

DOI: 10.1145/1487632.1487640
© 2009 ACM 1072-5220/09/0300 $5.00