The Internet of Things (IoT) will create the single largest, most chaotic conversation in the history of language. Imagine every human being on the planet stepping outside and yelling at the top of their lungs everything that comes into their heads, and you still wouldn’t be close to the scale of communications that are going to occur when all those IoT devices really get chattering.
Billions of devices, all talking away (and
listening) – whether it’s an industrial robot, a self-checkout Point of Sale, a car door sensor, an automated insulin injector, or a toy that teaches your kid to read. Some of them will only speak occasionally, some will talk all the time, some will be coy, and some will talk to anything that will listen. And, perhaps we should be offering the same advice to those chatty devices that generations of parents have already advised their children as they head out the door to play, “Don’t talk to strangers!”
For while we’ve spent a lot of time worrying about the privacy of our data (and we should, we really, really should) we should also spend some time thinking about all those devices and how we can keep their communications private, too.
