Is Society Ready for the Internet of Things?

The Internet of Things. A world where everything is interconnected, where more and more smart devices will be communicating with each other, exchanging one thing: data.
An interesting development in the field of the Internet of Things is the idea of Smart Cities. An idea that in theory will help us manage the ever growing part of society that is living in cities and that is currently making up already more than 50% of the world population. IT solutions, so is being thought, create opportunities for governments to remain in control over the chaos.
What once sounded as a futuristic idea, is getting closer and closer to our reality. Current developments such as self-driving cars and ‘smart lighting’ will contribute to a safer and more comfortable environment for all inhabitants. Google, Cisco, and Atos are all companies that are working with governments to realize this dream of the perfect city.
Let’s look at the city of Amsterdam as an example. The city currently collaborates with Google and KPN to develop smart lampposts for high-risk areas when it comes to safety. The square in front of the soccer stadium of the Amsterdam club Ajax, for instance, has been enriched with thirteen of these smart lampposts that are equipped not only with the traditional lamps, but also with wifi and cameras. The cameras detect not only the location of people on the square, but also their movements. They use wifi to communicate this information to each other, and to a central database. Algorithms that use past data and the current situation can then give signals to the smart lampposts when they predict a dangerous situation, which triggers the lights of the lamps to shine brighter. This is thought to create a ‘cooling’ effect on the situation. Not only do people behave differently once they are aware of surveillance, police can keep a close eye on the situation in order to prevent actual further escalation.
Of course, this all sounds like an ideal solution to make our cities even safer than they already are. However, I believe governments are not aware of the privacy concerns of the new possibilities. The CTO of Amsterdam, Ger Baron, ensures that the data that is provided to Google on for example, parking spaces, is anonimized; they blur out license plates so that people cannot be recognized. However, the notion of private is not so clear anymore in our digital version of the world. Google possesses so much data that it will be child’s play for them to unanonimize the data with, for example, their Google Earth shots of the environment.
And this data is the currency of the new world. Smarter algorithms and ever growing Big Data sources make it possible to trace movements of every citizen. The value of that? Enormous. It would not be surprising to me if we found that Google’s noble strive for safer roads and cities is driven by the value of the data that can be collected in the meantime. Because by combining all this data, companies will be able to further personalize offerings, by creating entire profiles of who we are, what we like, and how we think.
Technologies have developed so fast that our society is not yet ready to deal with all the new possibilities in a responsible way. Therefore it surprises me that our governments, the people who are supposed to think in our best interest, are joining this movement without fully understanding it. How many people in the parliament understand the risks of the Internet of Things? The people who do, people like us after our Msc in Business Information Management, are most likely to join the big names such as Google. I think it is time for the Dutch government (and possibly many more governments from all over the world) to realize they should put a stop to this brain drain, to create positions for these people in their parliaments, not only to learn more about the possible consequences of their collaborations but to create awareness among citizens.