The source document, below, is written by the staff of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), of which I am a member. I’m posting this information in the belief that it may benefit members of this forum.
Source: http://theinstitute.ieee.org/technol...lue-of-privacy
Quoting from the source document ...
The Internet of Things [IoT] is a network of items—each embedded with sensors—which are connected to the Internet.
Many IoT applications are already here. Sensor technology products for smarter homes, for example, can provide families with peace of mind, as their ads suggest. With just a click on a mobile device, users can activate a security system in a home, turn off lights while away on vacation, turn up the thermostat on a cold night while still an hour from home, or lock the front door from the driveway. Signals from all those sensors travel through a wireless network to be stored in the cloud [emphasis added], with the information analyzed and acted upon.
“Who is controlling what’s in the cloud? Do I trust my cloud-computing system?” asks IEEE Senior Member Neeli Prasad, vice president at SAI Technology, a developer of mobile cloud network systems in Santa Clara, Calif. “Do I trust the people who have access to my information?”
But with the IoT, or what some call the “Internet of Everything,” companies are planning to turn information about our every move into valuable market data. Soon, personalized ads—like those that follow online users from one website to the next—are likely to follow us in text messages and on face-scanning screens as we walk down store aisles. Information such as the purchases we make, our genders and ages, and the places we frequent will be collected to inform us—whether we care to know or not—what we might want to buy next. Although some argue that this brings added value by personalizing the shopping experience, others believe such uses of the IoT are invasions of privacy.
“Privacy as we know it will have to be completely redefined,” says IEEE Senior Member Raul Colcher, CEO of Questera, an information technology consulting company in Rio de Janeiro.
“[Consumers] may think we’re in charge of our shopper cards and our mobile apps and our smart fridges—but … let’s not fool ourselves. [The information] is not ours. It belongs to Google, and IBM, and Cisco Systems…and the global Mega-Corp that owns your local supermarket. If you don’t believe us, just try removing ‘your’ data from their databases.”