Lesson 3

Importance of the Internet of Things (IoT) in Society

3.1. Societal benefits of IoT
Let's talk a little bit about the benefits to society that Internet of Things can have. And
that's why we do these things, right, presumably is to benefit society, to help people. So,
we'll talk a little bit about that. So, generally, these IoT devices, the use of Internet of
Things technology makes life easier, that's the goal. In lots of different ways depending on
the device, but it's supposed to make life easier. So, for instance, some lectures ago we
talked about an Internet refrigerator, right? An Internet refrigerator that was
intelligent, could order your food for you. It takes care of things you don't necessarily want
to take care of, right? It takes care of these details that you would have had to spend time
on, but now you don't, right? It says okay, you need this food, I will order this food. And I
don't have to worry, necessarily, about doing that ordering, right, because I'm busy, I have
more important things to do. 

So, it's supposed to make things easy for you. Are my accounts balanced? Let's say I have
my phone device, I'm using it to do my banking, right, and it balances my accounts. It says
oh, you owe this much, I will simply transfer the money, right? So that was a detail where
maybe I don't want to deal with those details, right? I want to do something fun with my
life, but I must balance my accounts and pay my bills. But my device can deal with that
for me rather than me having to think about it consciously all the time, right? So, that's
generally the goal of IoT is to just enhance these devices to make them better. And the key
thing, key aspect of that is to make them better without adding complexity. So, you don't
want to have to, sure, say I would like to have a refrigerator that can order my food for me,
right? But I don't want to have to write code to get it to do that. I want it to be easy, almost
as easy as a regular refrigerator, but still do these nice things for me. So, you enhance the
features of some devices to make them do things that are very helpful to you. But you
don't want to enhance the features in such a way that it increases complexity. So, the
complexity is dealt with by the computational infrastructure inside the device.

IoT can also help you be independent of people, right. So, you don't need to have as many
people as you used to have to do certain things. So, this is good, and this is bad, right. So,
certain things that you would have had humans deal with, now your IoT device can deal
with for you. So, for instance, fewer doctor visits, right. If I had my health monitor on my
wrist, I don't have to necessarily go to the doctor to have the doctor tell me oh, your blood
sugar level is fine, right? Or, your heart rate is fine, everything is going well. My device can
see that and report back to me and say yes, everything is fine, and I don't need to see the
doctor as much. Now, there's still always a need for a doctor, but maybe just when
something calamitous happens. Maybe on a regular basis, I don't need to see the doctor
as much. So, going to the supermarket. I don't have to go the supermarket if my fridge is
buying my food for me, right? And ordering it on Amazon Fresh, or something like that. I
don't have to deal with that nearly as much. So, I don't have to interact with people as
much as a I had to. Now, interactions can be good. But also, depending on people for
things can be burdensome. 
So maybe if you have a bunch of Internet of things, IoT devices that are helping you, you
can depend a little bit less on people, and take care of things independently. And this is
very helpful for people who are infirm, or maybe you're older, you're inform, and you
don't want to have to depend on people. You want to be able to live independently. IoT
devices can help you a lot. So, for instance, cars that are coming online that drive
themselves, right? Ultimate IoT device, drives you to where you want to go. That can be
helpful if you're old enough where you can't, maybe you lose your license because your
vision is bad, or something like this. Your reaction time is slow. If you have a car that can
drive itself, drive to wherever you want to go, that's a big advantage, right? So not having
to depend on a person, to hire a person to do that, you can just have your IoT device do
that for, could be very helpful to you.

 Also, IoT devices, they got Internet right there in the term, they connect into the network,
so you can connect to people. So, in some ways, it can enhance your interaction with
people in a different form. So maybe not in person interaction, but you can talk to people
on the network, right. Through any device that you feel like using, right. So, you can have
all sorts of personal interactions, but also professional interactions. So, you can do, we get
this a lot at work now. Rather than going all the way to a conference and spending money
to fly out there, stay at a hotel. We can have meetings online and I don't have to move
anywhere. I can just use the camera in front of me. I can use my phone, and just do a
conference right there, right. So, it’s a lot cheaper, and it's not the same as in person
interaction, but it can save you a lot of money in the long term

3.2. Risks, Privacy and Security

So, in this lecture we'll discuss some of the downsides of Internet of Things technology,
some of the risks, and especially the privacy and security issues that come up when you
have IoT devices as pervasive as they are doing things and out of your control at some
extent. So, one advantage that we listed in the last lecture was that you don't have to
depend on people as much. You can depend on your IoT device to do things for you,
and you don't have to deal with people as much. So, the downside of that is potential
social isolation, right? You don't have to leave your house if you don't want to. You can be
a hermit. Stay in your house, never walk out, and have everything come to
you. Right? Now, usually it doesn't go to that extreme, but it can happen. It depends on
the mindset of the person who's using the device. But if you need to interact with people
less, you have less of an excuse to go out there and deal with people. And this picture is
showing all these people looking at their cell phones. This a constant problem,
right? People looking at their phones even in quote unquote, social engagements. Say
you're at a party and people at the party, which is meant for human interaction, reading
their cell-phones, and looking down at their devices rather than interacting. So, you can
have this increased risk of social isolation because you don't have to interact with people.
Another big problem with IoT is that you're now more dependent on technology, and all
the infrastructure that comes along with it. So, if things go down, like for instance my
email. And this is not even really an Internet of Things issue. But, email, I use it on a
standard computer or my phone too, if I want to. But if email goes down, it's a serious
impediment to me. I need my email daily, really, an hourly basis. I need to get emails from
people. And so, when that type of thing goes down, it's a problem for work and even for
personal life, right? I communicate with some people personally with some people
through email, or texting or whatever communication technology you use. When you're
using it through IoT, through the internet, and through your devices, when your device
goes down, or when the network itself goes down, it's a big problem for you. So, power
outages in general are a big problem because all your devices are going down. I mean
their charges are go to die even if they're on battery. But if your device goes down. 

So, for instance, if my phone, so this happens to my wife all the time. She has a phone. I
won't say the brand. She has a popular phone. When she gets an update on her
phone, like she just recently got an update on her phone. The thing just hangs
up. Regularly. Just yesterday, she's talking to me and suddenly it hangs up. She talks to
me again. It hangs up for no reason, right. Because the update that was supposed to
improve her device. So now, her being dependent on this device all the time, when she
gets an update and it goes wrong, when there are bugs in the software, it's a much more
serious problem. And buggy software is always a problem on a desktop, say, but when it's
something that you use a lot. For instance, if it's a life critical thing, like we talked about
insulin pumps a couple of lectures back. If that thing has a bug, that's a serious problem. I
mean, you can die off that, right? A pacemaker has a bug, there's a serious problem. And
these things happened in medical devices too, that you've had these bugs and people
have died. We won't go into them; I don't have slides on these right now. But there are
devices that this has happened. And the more these IoT devices get integrated into our
lives, the more dependent we are. So, when they go wrong, it's a much worse problem for
us.

Privacy and Security. So another property of these IoT devices is they are, they're
recording information. They are observing us. Now, presumably for our benefit. But they
are observing us a lot and they are pervasive, so everywhere. So, for instance, your cell
phone. That thing is observing your location. If you have your location services on, which
most people have on because a lot of applications depend on those services. You have
that on, it is reported your GPS, your location always, and it can easily be sending that
data back to Apple or whoever, whoever your manufacture is. And that happens all the
time. This type of data is being tracked by your phone and sent back to some central
location. Now maybe they're using it for good purposes, to help you. Like having your
location means that when you're looking for a restaurant, you don't have to report your
location, it just knows, and it can tell you where all the nearby restaurants are. So that can
be beneficial. But it is tracking you all the time. Health monitors. They're tracking your
health information, right, all the time, and sending them on a network to some cloud
server. So, there's important information about your health that is being transmitted over
the network and stored in some remote server.
TV watching habits, media watching, whatever media you're watching. That type of thing
is. So, say you've got a new TV, it can track, in fact it typically records what you watch. In
fact, my DVR it flags, when I'm looking at the list of TV shows, it flags which ones it thinks
I'll want to watch. Now, how does it figure that out? It's tracking my activity, knows what
type of shows I've watched in the past, finds similar shows and suggest them to me. So
that's a benefit, right? But just understand that it is tracking everything that you're
watching on your TV or your DVR, things like this. We see this all the time with people must
have interacted with this when you buy something online. So, one thing I do is I build quad
copters with my son. We build quad copters, I have a research project on this, remote
control, right? Whenever I make purchase like a quad captor purchase, suddenly all the
ads I see are for quad captor parts. Motors and RC controls and all this, and you must have
interacted with this, right? It's tracking what you're buying, and then just throwing ads at
you. It's doing it for marketing purposes, but it's throwing ads at you according to things
you've bought in the past. So, purchasing habits, cell phone or whatever device you're
purchasing on. Say if your refrigerator's making purchases for you, food purchases for you
or something like that, the fridge itself can track that data and give it to some third party.

Driving habits. So, cars have lots of sensors, about the speed and things like that, and if
you're hitting the brake, something like that. And car incident reporting, the insurance
agencies can use that when you're trying to get money back for your car. So, say you crash
your car, and you say, look, I was hitting the brake and they say, well, the car says you
weren't hitting the break. So, you owe us this much money, right? So that type of data is
being recorded, sent to insurance agencies, and they can use that against you. So, data
can be used to market to you. I already mentioned this, but the ads that you see on your
computer or on your phone, those things happen, they pick ads, basically
selectively, based on what your purchase habits are. So, if they know you're interested in
buying a particular type of device, you'll get ads related to that. Health problems. So, if
they know you're on a certain type of drug, they'll give you ads for related drugs for
related issues, things like this. So, that's probably the most popular use of this data is
marketing, right?

Often you give permission to the person you purchase the device from, you give them
permission to use that data in those long agreements that you click Okay to. So, when you
buy a device, buy a phone, or put an application on your phone, and it says do you accept
the agreement terms? And you don't read that, but you click Okay. So, in that, you are
giving up all ownership of all data often. Right? So, all this data that's being tracked, it can
legally be given to some third-party agency, and then they can sell that data whenever
they want to. So, it's hard to keep track of your data. You don't know who has your
data, because you agreed at some point to allow them to own that data. Oh, insurance
agencies. So, the car accidents, car insurance. They can track the data about your car see
how you were driving at the time of the accident and use that information. It could be
used to your advantage. They could say oh, you did hit the brakes, so it's not your fault. Or
they could say look, you didn't hit the brakes, so it is your fault. So, it can be used either
way.

Also, undiagnosed health problems. So, this is a little creepy, but this can certainly
happen. 
So, insurance agencies are basically statisticians. They do statistics to determine health
insurance. How much they are gone to charge you; they do based on the state of your
health. So, they can predict what the state of your health will be based on available
data. So, for instance, say you've got Fitbit, and Fitbit is recording data about your
health. How your heart rate and things like this. That data can be used by an insurance
agency to figure out how much they want to charge you. They can say look, based on your
health right now, we can predict that in a few years, you might come down with this
disease and so we're going to charge you more. So, this type of information is very useful
to different agencies in different ways. And you should be aware that while these IoT
devices are beneficial to you, they are storing data and that data may or may not be in
your control. Security's another thing. Often this data is held in the cloud somewhere.

 So, say Fit-Bit, it tracks your data, it sends it to some cloud servers. Now, this is medical
information, and you would like it to remain private. And they maybe try to keep it private,
but there are hackers. There are people who steal data, and you must have heard about
this in the news. And so, the data can be attacked at the cloud server, and it's out of your
control. So, if that data isn't maintained in a secure way. So, what we're showing over here
is basically a rough picture of an encryption algorithm. But the idea is that data would
need to be encrypted. If it's private data, health data, you'd like that to be encrypted on
the cloud server. But you as a user don't have any control, direct control over whether
encryption is being used, or maybe it's not being used consistently. You can't control that
directly, right? That's up to the cloud server. So, you are left to trust them to take care of
your data, and often these agencies are not trustworthy. I don't want to name names, but
if you've heard about any hacks about companies having their databases stolen. And it's
happened many times over the last few months or the last few years, that data isn't being
held in a secure way and then your private data stolen. So, this can happen.