to consent, this status quo is not surprising. Regulation, unfortunately, has to date created only a veneer of consent—a legal illusion of choice and control—but design has not delivered interactions that support genuine informed choices that regulators assume data-harvesting services should follow.

The stats are very clear about how broken terms and conditions pages are: If we were to read these “agreements” it would be nearly a full-time job [ 1]. More disturbingly, these terms are generally written to require a sophisticated level of reading comprehension—beyond the norm for the population using these services [ 2]. So even if we did read these T&C, most of us wouldn’t understand them. When we give our consent under such conditions, it isn’t meaningful.

We are also asked to consider these terms at exactly the moment work in HCI on task interruption has shown is the wrong time [ 3]: when that request gets in the way of our primary task.

We click the “agree” button because clicking it gets rid of the screen so that we can get on with posting our cat video or uploading a draft of our paper to a co-editing site or synchronizing our calendar with a cloud service.

Many of us became acclimatized to this meaningless box clicking around installing software: Yes, yes we don’t own it, uh huh we’re just leasing it, and no we won’t make copies of it. Sure. In those days, however, it was rare for software to call home to the mothership to locate our particular copies. Now, it is commonplace for software to be deployed as a service that knows exactly where it is and how many copies have been authorized. But that service, especially when deployed on phones or mobile devices, gathers far more information for very amorphous reasons than just registration confirmation.

More troubling, as has been shown when installing apps on phones: Few people are even aware that the app is (re)setting permissions to access personal data not needed for its operation [ 4], such as our contacts and text messages. There is also the belief that this personal-data capture is a trade with the developer, and that if one pays for the app then that data trade is closed. Not so. Some apps take even more liberties in the paid version. Consent is not meaningless in this context—it’s nonexistent.

In the app case, research suggests
that few people are aware that data-
The Internet of Things, we are told,
is about to achieve epic scale, with
Cisco and Ericsson (Dave Evans and
Hans Vestburg, respectively) having
predicted that there will be 50 billion
devices connected to the Internet by

2020 (though each have since revised their estimates down to 30 billion and

28 billion). Their ecosystem is wildly heterogeneous. Many devices will be capturing the same identification data over and over; others will be part of networks sharing data, such as cars moving through various jurisdictions and associated infrastructures with their own terms for data sharing. One of the key concerns of the Io T and its high-speed cousin, the Internet of Vehicles, is just how that data may be captured and shared, not only within one fixed environment like a home, but across environments, from the wired High Street (like that shopping scene in Minority Report mapping ads to eyeballs to associated customer profiles) to moving from one location to another.

In other words, as the objects of our environment become more connected to the Net, do we simply become another thing on the Net, reducing our privacy, and our civic values, in the names of everything from convenience to counterterrorism? Likewise, given the vast scale, speed, and heterogeneity of this new ecosystem, are we creating new risks to our personal and national security, both as citizens and as societies—not even from willful hacking but just because the scale of our Io T reach will exceed our grasp of all the necessary protections that we assume are ours in a civil society?

In response to the current data status quo and in anticipation of this changing ecosystem, new rules for data sharing have been established. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) approved by the EU Parliament on April 14, 2016, will be enforced across the Union (and enshrined in law by the U. K.) starting May 25,

2018. These regulations have been put
in place well in advance of the technical
means to sustain their implementation.
Consequently, there is a key moment
for HCI and UX research and design to
influence society for good, not just to
design wonderful devices for the Io T but
also to consider the wicked problems of
how to make apparent for developers,
designers, businesses, policymakers, and
citizens the mechanisms and personal-
data-driven assumptions that enable the
Io T. By this deliberate engagement we
can help surface the implications of data
sharing in order to develop models of
understanding, social expectations for
understanding trade-offs, and means for
developers to know their designs comply
with these expectations and for citizens
and policymakers to be able to trust
that they do. Because of our expertise
in understanding both technology and
especially human-centered approaches
to design, we have this key role to play in
informing the shape of these exchanges
and to create an ecosystem that supports
social, technical, meaning ful consent at
Io T scale.

To better see these opportunities for the future, let’s consider the status quo of data-sharing consent in the current digital economy.

 

CITIZEN CONSENT IN DATA SHARING: THE MARGARINE OF CONSENT The Internet has made liars of us all. No one has used a browser, a social media site, or a smartphone app without encountering a box that says, before continuing, that A) we have read the terms and conditions of a service and B) we agree to them. We click “agree” when we haven’t a clue if we do or don’t. In other words, in a world where our personal data is largely the oil that greases the wheels that keep the Internet running, we have very little meaningful say in what data is collected and how it’s used, and why we may wish to limit it, or for that matter, give it away in buckets. Given the current (some might say insulting) approach

We click the “agree” button because
clicking it gets rid of the screen so that
we can get on with posting our cat video
or uploading a draft of our paper.

COVER STORY