INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Fen Zhao
Contributor
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Fen Zhao is an early stage investor at Alpha Edison
who previously developed public private partnerships at the National Science Foundation in the areas of data science and cybersecurity
For most people, the thought of a smart device sharing their intimate conversations and sending those recordings along to their
acquaintances is the stuff of dystopian nightmares
And for one family in Portland, it a nightmare that became all too real when their Amazon Echo sent a recording of a private conversation to
a random contact in their phone book.
Mercifully, the recorded conversation was fairly banal — a chat about home renovations
But as smart home technology is swiftly being integrated into our daily lives and private spaces, it not difficult to imagine far worse
scenarios.
Smart speakers record residents& conversations
Thermostats equipped with motion sensors track the whereabouts of each household member, and when they leave the house
Refrigerators remember grocery lists and spending habits
One thing is clear: when residents invite smart technology into their homes, they are gambling with their privacy.
Ironically, the smart
home may turn out to be the salvation of online privacy itself
Internet companies have gotten away with hoarding people personal data for so long in part because of what experts call ''the privacy
paradox&: while most people claim to care deeply about online privacy, very few of them take action to protect it
Just look at the recent furor over Facebook lack of data privacy protections, which resulted in the compromise of 87 million users& personal
Though plenty of people tweeted they would #DeleteFacebook, how many actually permanently closed their accounts Certainly far fewer than 87
million.
While experts disagree about why this paradox exists, at least some of the problem seems rooted in the fact that online space is
virtual, whereas our privacy instincts evolved in physical space
By bringing virtual privacy incursions into the physical world—particularly into the protected private space of the home—smart home
technology could short-circuit that dynamic.
The internet is intangible, and so its privacy risks appear to be too
It one thing to know, in the back of your mind, that Facebook has the ability to comb through your private messages
But when devices in your home are recording your spoken conversations and physical movements, it harder to ignore the looming threat of
potentially disastrous privacy violations.
If smart fridges and smart locks get people to take online privacy as seriously as physical
privacy, they could do what the Equifax hack and other high-profile data breaches could not: actually get people to change their behavior
If users vote for privacy with their feet—or their wallets—they could spur a wholesale rethinking of the online economy, away from
one-sided exploitation and toward greater trust and transparency.
Privacy in virtual space
In Western culture, the home has long been
recognized as a protected zone; the Talmud includes prohibitions against putting in windows in a house that directly look into a neighbor&s
When a stranger peeps through our window or listens at our door, millennia-old norms tell us we should chase them away
This desire for isolation may stem from a fundamental biological need; whether you&re a human or a possum, physical withdrawal means
concealment and protection from predation, making privacy an evolutionary life-or-death matter.
But websites and apps have no physical
A software algorithm, no matter how malicious, doesn''t have the visceral menace of an unknown face at the glass
The internet disarms us by making our interactions feel abstract, even unreal
One 2016 study posited that this sense of unreality leads to contradictory attitudes about online privacy: while people know rationally that
they should be concerned about virtual incursions, they simply don''t have a strong &gut feeling& about it intuitively
And when making decisions in the moment, gut feeling often wins out.
The problem is exacerbated by the fact that online, there is less of a
clear distinction between private and public space
We use social media to communicate simultaneously with hundreds or thousands of anonymous followers and with our closest friends
Email inboxes, Slack channels, and the like are more obviously &closed& spaces, but even there it often unclear to users which algorithms
Even Snapchat—known for auto-deleting users& photos, videos, and chats to protect their privacy—announced it would allow retargeted ads
in fall 2017, to relatively little backlash
It hard to think about protecting ourselves from the stranger peeping in the window when we&re not even sure if it a public or private space
he or she is looking into
What more, many users tend to imagine online &walls& that aren''t really there.
Multiple studies have shown that the mere existence of a
privacy policy on a website makes users feel more secure, even though a policy in itself is no guarantee that their data won''t be sold to
third parties.
How secure are your light bulbs
When the internet enters the clearly private space of the home, some of that ambiguity will
It telling that a November 2017 survey by Deloitte found that consumers are more cautious in general about smart home devices compared to
general online activities or even other categories of IoT
Forty percent of respondents said that they felt smart home technology &reveals too much about their personal lives,& while another 40
percent said they were worried about their usage being tracked
By comparison, they were less mistrustful of other IoT applications like autonomous vehicles and smart car technology, even though they have
similar tracking capabilities.
And that survey only considers peoples& reaction to fairly abstract privacy risks
The reality is that in a smart home, security vulnerabilities and data breaches can have much more dramatic real-world impacts
On his blog Charged, developer and journalist Owen Williams recently detailed his experience trying to figure out who or what kept
overriding his brightness settings for his Phillips Hue smart light bulbs
It turned out that an app he&d enabled to dim his office lights at night had taken over all the bulbs hooked up to Williams& Hue system and
was keeping them at one uniform brightness.
As Williams points out, if a malicious app accomplished the same feat, it could extort money
from the user by &randomly changing the brightness or color of lights until they pay.& When a cyberattack results in lights that won''t stop
flashing—or doors that won''t lock, windows that won''t close, or a fridge turns itself off and melts all your ice cream—it logical that
people reactions to digital privacy incursions will become that much more extreme.
Image courtesy of RamCreativ
Trust is the antidote
How
can internet companies thrive in the privacy-sensitive space of the home If privacy behavior is mostly about gut feelings, they&ll need to
reinforce positive ones by winning consumers& trust.
Trust has not historically been a major factor in the adoption of complex new
technologies—research into technology acceptance models on both virtual and IOT systems shows that usability has been much more important
Even heavy users of Google and Facebook probably wouldn''t say that they trust either company very deeply.
However, a look at another
internet giant, Airbnb, shows how this calculus changes when users& homes and not just their online identities are involved
Airbnb puts trust at the core of its business model
Hosts are only willing to open their homes to strangers because the company empowers them with access to information about potential guests
(which the guests themselves choose to provide), including their bio, reviews, and public Facebook profile.
By focusing on forging
connections between hosts and guests, Airbnb builds community and reduces the uncertainty that pervades users& relationships with so many
Airbnb is also relatively transparent about how it collects and analyzes user data, and often puts it to use in ways that increase users&
control over how they use the platform—for instance, to generate more accurate pricing suggestions for hosts
The result: it pushes users& concerns about opening their homes or staying in others& spaces out of the realm of gut feeling into that of a
more considered, rational (and easy to ignore) concern.
If they want to thrive amid rising privacy concerns in the long term, manufacturers
of smart home products, would be wise to take a page from Airbnb book
They should find ways to forge trust through absolute transparency, sharing with customers what data is being collected and how it being
They should create new business models that don''t rely on collecting terabytes and terabytes of personal data, but on building trust & and
even community & with customers.=
Companies should not only implement best practices for personal data encryption, storage, sharing, and
deletion, but design their products around the customer ability to control their own data
If the development of IoT follows this path, the next 10 to 15 years won''t bring an inevitable erosion of privacy, but its renaissance.
