I may be getting paranoid (at least my wife thinks so), but every time I hear/read about the internet of things, all that is said is how wonderful it will be to have everything interconnected and accessible from anywhere you happen to be. However, after all the revelations about the collection and misuse of meta data, it seems to me that the potential for abuse once my entire home is online is enormous. We already know what can be inferred from phone meta data. What inferences could be made when outside agencies know the frequency of use devices like my fridge, stove, air-conditioner and possibly even my light switches and toilet. When my TV is online and data on my viewing habits is routinely collected, what will that tell the watchers about me?
I don't get the internet of things at all. Why do I need my toaster to text me that it has finished my toast??? It used be so inefficient dinging a bell, next they will figure out how to make it automatically turn off and eject the bread (oh wait....)
Oh and a fridge that will let you know when you need more milk, how revolutionary! I used to have to open the fridge and shake the container to figure that conundrum out!
I can't wait for them to put cameras around my front door so that it can text me when someone wants to come in and let me see who is there before opening the door. Because that would be just so much more efficient than those clunky old things like doorbells, peep holes and windows! Come on its the 21st century to do really expect your visitors to go to the effort of pressing a disgusting dirty button???
The thing is, is that nothing is private any more. There will always be someone sat 1,000 miles away who knows everything about you. I completely agree, we have every reason to worry, it won't be long and our entire homes will be ran over the internet.
My biggest worry is banking apps on phones, because nothing is completely secure right? So we open it up by sending people money by just sticking in our phone numbers. Nightmare waiting to happen. It's just hard to imagine where the internet will take us in 20 years time.
fridge, stove, air-conditioner and possibly even my light switches and toilet
Thats all okay, until some hacker does his stuff and before you know it your house is turning against you and the toilet starts attacking you lol.
I'm actually surprised we haven't had more incidents of people's credit card information being stolen from those "tap n' go" cards. Lots have people have shown how anybody can collect it using a laptop several feet away from the cashier. Banking apps on phones aren't much better since most cell phone signals aren't encrypted.
Maybe like prior to advanced currency production (so counterfeiting was easy) we'll go back to a world where everyone accepts a proportion of transactions will be fraudulant...
The thing is, is that nothing is private any more.
The point is that a lot of this loss of privacy is by your choice. I choose not to post my entire life of Facebook. I do not have a cell phone. People keep telling me that having a cell phone is "so convenient". It's only convenient for people who are trying to get hold of me. I carried one for ten years when I was on call 24x7. It was not a convenience.
The Japanese have developed a toilet that analyzes your pee and poo. I don't think it is necessary for the NSA to know how much fibre I am getting in my diet.
Oh yes, it is necessary for the NSA to know how much fibre you are getting in your diet. With the cost of the affordable care act going up, the government needs to know that you are living healthy.
Also, eating a Middle Eastern diet would make you a potential suspect.
When it comes to the internet of things, I'm not so concerned with the whole "recording your life habits" part of it. If the NSA wants to gather statistics on how many pieces of toast I eat in the morning, then let them waste their time (they're already wasting 99.999% of their time with the huge net they cast, and the miniscule outcomes from it).
What does scare me however is the security threat every device poses. Your home network is only as secure as your weakest entry point. There's the classic trick of hacking into the router instead of a persons computer, as most people don't configure much security on their router. Then, of course, hackers have a field day with every new smart device that comes out, from baby monitors to toy robots to whatever, most of which have proven to be ridiculously easy to hack, with no configurable security and often provide open doors into vulnerable protocols like uPnP. The general rule is that any one device on a typical home network is a stepping stone to get into all devices.
The NSA or whoever might be peeping into what I do on the internet (which is already an unacceptable violation of privacy, by my reckoning), but I can at least be somewhat confident that I can mount some decent defenses against intrusions into my computer or access to critical data. Maybe it can't stop an expert hacker, but at least bots and your average hackers.
But with 20 different cloud-connected "smart" devices that I cannot even attempt to secure that are floating around on my home network, that will be the end of data security.
Connecting too any things to the internet will eventually slow it down to the point were it will not be very useful. The big debate about "Net Neutrality" goes on right now.
Standard & Poor's has given the debt of social media giant Twitter the rating "junk".
Near Field Communication (NFC) payment systems allows people to pay for goods and services by touching their mobile phone to a special payment terminal.
The inclusion of this technology and its bugs on phones has proven useful to hackers seeking a stealthy way to take over a mobile phone and give an attacker complete access to a device's data.
As I pointed out in another thread, it also makes payment one more step removed from your money making it almost certain to drive people even further into debt. If every time you went to buy something you had to open your wallet and see how much money was in there, and how much was left after taking out the money to pay, you'd be less likely to buy stuff that was not within your budget. Indeed, you'd be unable to pay once the cash was gone. Credit cards take you one step away from that instant connection with your money. NFC takes you even one more step away.
If every time you went to buy something you had to open your wallet and see how much money was in there, and how much was left after taking out the money to pay, you'd be less likely to buy stuff that was not within your budget.
There have been psychological studies which actually show that people are much less willing to buy stuff if they have to pay cash than if it is via credit card or over the internet. But it doesn't have to do with budgetting or the cash running out it has to do with the psychological pay of loss when you are handing over physical currency than if it is just digital numbers going down.
The British spy agency the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) has used a sophistcated version of the Regin virus to infect the Belgian telecommunications company Belgacom.
By targeting engineers through a faked LinkedIn page, GCHQ was able to get deep inside the Internet provider to steal data. One of Belgacom's main clients was the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council of member state leaders.
Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/now-know-developed-state-sponsored-180205552.html
Twitter Inc will begin tracking what third-party apps are installed on users' mobile devices so the social media company can deliver more tailored content, including ads.
Source:
http://news.yahoo.com/twitter-start-tracking-users-mobile-apps-163828964--finance.html
You can disable that from within the application^, although its on be default ..
I am not a Twitterer since I don't want them to violate the privacy of my e-mail contact list.
The New York City Police Department has a staff of 1000 that looks on the internet at social media like Facebook, Twitter to discover potential threads against the city.
(Heard on a recent interview of the Police Commissioner.)
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