With the ever rising internet penetration, what has mushroomed is the rising trend of Internet of Things (IoT) and the connected devices. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been adopted rapidly across the globe where millions of connected sensors and smart devices are deployed on a daily basis in offices, homes, and all over the cities which results in the reduction of cost, energy consumption, and improvement of the efficiency and customer services. The IoT is one of the biggest breakthroughs in the technology industry and is becoming a part of every aspect of life such as retail shops, hotels, cars, airplanes, and others.
However, these come with some challenges. And leading that list of challenges are the security & privacy concerns. There are a few miniature sized devices as good as the size of the button that are hard to catch the attention and yet could spy on an individual’s activities! As shocking as it sounds, it is equally a dangerous weapon if misused. There has been a relevant study conducted at the ACM CHI 2020 conference, Hong where the researchers explored various solutions to the hidden IoT device challenge. The researchers first asked 226 people through a survey about the privacy concerns of these individuals about devices while traveling and their strategies and motives in finding them.
While this study is still in its early phase of creating prototypes for IoT locators, the researchers involved are hopeful for this being a step towards addressing the hidden camera issues. “Our hope is that the findings in this paper can help industry and policymakers in adopting the idea of locators for IoT devices,” says Hong. This could prove to a probable breakthrough stride towards tackling the increasing privacy challenges with the IoT.
A huge amount of personal information of a user is shared among multiple devices making privacy of utmost importance for the user. Apart from the privacy issue, data security and data loss are the major concerns for large as well as small businesses as it results in losing money and time to recover information which is vital for every business. Moreover, it can disrupt the everyday operations of any business, thereby making it vital for every business to implement various IoT security solutions. The commercial perspective too adds more significance to this research.
