Internet of Things Part2: Will the Internet of Things be a privacy nightmare or consumer paradise?

July 22, 2016 | Posted by admin << back to blog

Will the Internet of Things be a privacy nightmare or consumer paradise?

According to Gartner, Inc. (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3185623), more than half of major new business processes and systems will incorporate some element of the Internet of Things (IoT) by 2020. The impact of the IoT on consumers’ lives and corporate business models is rapidly increasing as the cost of “instrumenting” physical things with sensors and connecting them to other things — devices, systems and people — continues to drop.

“Uses of the IoT that were previously impractical will increasingly become practical,” said Roy Schulte, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The IoT is relevant in virtually every industry, although not in every application. While there will be no purely ‘IoT applications’ , there will be many applications that leverage the IoT in some small or large aspect of their work. As a result, business analysts and developers of information-centric processes need to have the expertise and the tools to implement IoT aspects that play a role in their systems.”

Take for example I Doctor, a device that can be attached to a smart phone with an App on your smart phone that could substitute a BP Monitor, ECG & Sonography and will transmit it real time to your doctor besides storing the data on your phone. Watch this amazing video on You Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HspGimAYa6s . According to John Bates, CMO, Software AG ‘In ten years’ time we could be living in a world of sensors and connected human beings -.

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT), or a network of embedded sensors in everyday ‘things’, is going to shake up the way businesses and consumers interact, and blur the boundaries between the physical and digital realms. But there is little understanding yet of how these much-hyped technologies will play out for real companies and their customers in the real world.

Panelists at Software AG’s annual conference in 2014 discussed the daunting implications of a hyper-connected world, and how it will work in practice for businesses and their customers. The group of experts, including chief startup liaison for Rackspace, head of IT strategy at international finance group DBS Bank, got together to discuss the hallmarks that will separate the winners from the losers in the ‘digital arms race’ for the IoT.

In banking the applications for streaming and geolocation data are going to be ‘incredible,’ said the head of IT strategy at DBS Bank, such as the ability to use streaming analytics to create a greater picture of each transaction, drilling down into their contextual meaning and turning a negative customer experience such as a declined transaction into a positive one and the use of self-learning machine algorithms is already helping to identify patterns that could indicate rogue trading and market abuse.

But this new level of intimacy between a company and its customers can be un-nerving . The race in developing machine learning artificial technology capabilities such as those being built by Apple and Google points to a far closer interaction between the Internet of Things and human beings. ‘Apple CEO Tim Cook has come out and said very clearly ‘we will not use your data in certain ways ! However, every company will need to make use of all the data at their disposal if they want to keep up with the other guys who are not going to play by the rules. Soon our glasses are going to have the most intimate information about us, everything we wear, everything around us and most certainly this data will be used.

There is going to be a world where sensors will eventually be able to record biological data directly from human beings, such as glucose levels and blood pressure, potentially flagging health issues before the person knows about them. This could have wide-ranging implications for healthcare, insurance, and even mental health.

Hence it will be a world where companies ‘will know you very deeply, deeper than even you know yourself. and for many it will be a case of going over the freaky line and in a few years’ time we could be living in that world of sensors and connected human beings. There are many implications but it will absolutely transform our behaviour and the way multiple industries work.

Therefore, the moot question is Internet of Things a consumer paradise or a privacy nightmare ?

Prof. T.N.Swaminathan

Professor – Marketing,

Director – Branding, Public Relations & Alumni Relations

Great Lakes Institute of Management, Chennai.

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