The Internet of Things is changing our lives in ways that most of us don’t fully understand. With the pervasive use of location monitoring, social media and now sensors on our bodies, in our cars and our appliances, we are under surveillance constantly, for which we have volunteered. As this blog post in Huffington Post points out, we may not be able to put the genie back in the bottle but at least we need communications transparency to understand what we give up when we give information and choose to use these new technologies.
Being an educated consumer today isn’t just about knowing as much as we can about what we buy. It’s also understanding what information is being collected about us, how it will might be aggregated with other information that different companies collect, and what ramifications might lurk down the road.
A new covenant between the consumer and the corporations that provide us with goods and services needs to be established, based on good communication, transparency and honorable actions.
