The Internet of Things - Are the Benefits Worth the Risk ?

NPR published an interesting discussion about the Internet of Things. IBM really cemented the idea in my mind, when they described "Smarter Planet" a few years ago. At the time, the discussion was about more & more devices having addresses on the Internet. If they could be connected, they could and would yield gobs of information. Some of it direct, like how much food is in the fridge. While others are more about metadata, the information about the information, such as watching trends, rather than transactions.

In the NPR article, it included an image of a tablet, which was ostensibly controlling the door looks of a home, amongst other things. My immediate thought was "How do we insure our security of home & property ?". I immediately have this nightmare vision of a computer work like Stuxnet that targets the door locks on every Canadian home !

To me, that begs the question: does the value of being able to unlock your front door from your tablet outweight the risks of exposing your front door to the Internet ? My father had a brilliant line, that I learned on his knee at about age 6. He said "Just because you CAN do something, Mark - doesn't mean you SHOULD". That sticks with me to this day.

You can read the original NPR article here. And you can watch a TED talk on Stuxnet here.

 

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