Last May at the ThingsCon conference in Berlin a group of European designers came together to form the IoT Manifesto.
Now vendors have the ability to put a chip into almost anything companies and designers are tempted to add connectivity simply for the sake of doing so.
In many cases this is opens up a range of security risks ranging from the screaming baby monitor to the hackable jeep.
Coupled with the security risks of your intimate devices being hacked there’s the related privacy risks as millions of devices collect data ranging from how hard you press your car’s brake pedal through to last time you burned your breakfast toast.
In an era where governments and businesses are seeking to amass even more information about us, there are genuine concerns about what that data is going to be used for and why it is being collected in the first place.
The IoT manifesto looks to manage these problems facing the sector through ten guiding design principles;
- Don’t believe the hype around the IoT
- Only design useful things
- Deliver benefits to all stakeholders
- Keep everything secure
- Promote a culture of privacy
- Gather only a minimal amount of data
- Be transparent about who that data will be shared with
- Give users control over their data
- Design durable products
- Use the IoT and its design to help people
All of the principles are laudable and it’s not hard to think that meeting the guidelines would make devices and services that aren’t just useful and safe but also simpler, cheaper and more effective.
There’s many ethical, business and safety issues facing the Internet of Things as connected devices rollout across almost every industry. The IoT Manifesto may well be a good framework in which to design them and the cloud services they’ll depend upon.