PRIVACY

The 4th Amendment of our Constitution protects our right to privacy. It states that a search cannot be conducted

…without a warrant, and probable cause supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

But according to the third party doctrine, data collected from a third party does not warrant 4th Amendment protection. So for example, government or law enforcement can access data without a warrant from cell phone companies about where, when, and to whom a particular call was made. Similarly, government and law enforcement can access IoT or smart meter data to use as evidence in court. Note two recent homicide cases, here and here. The rationale is that in using these technologies, customers presumably have agreed to relinquish this information. It should be noted that in some states (such as Pennsylvania, one cannot opt out of a smart meter at all. And in other states, a customer must pay a hefty fee to opt out, rendering “implied consent” meaningless. 

Apple Health Data on a smart phone was recently used to gather evidence in a murder trial.

The app recorded a portion of the suspects activity as “climbing stairs”, which authorities were able to correlate with the time he would have dragged his victim down the river embankment, and then climbed back up. Freiburg police sent an investigator to the scene to replicate his movements, and sure enough, his Health app activity correlated with what was recorded on the defendant’s phone.

The streams of data literally oozing from everything we do, and the images increasingly being matched to our data, create a near picture-perfect life log of each of us and the end of 4th Amendment protections.

In Shredding the Fourth Amendment in Post-Constitutional America, author Peter Van Buren states:

In Post-Constitutional America, the government might as well have taken scissors to the original copy of the Constitution stored in the National Archives, then crumpled up the Fourth Amendment and tossed it in the garbage can….Our government spies on us. All of us. Without suspicion. Without warrants. Without probable cause. Without restraint. This would qualify as “unreasonable” in our old constitutional world, but no more.

Van Buren continues:

The techno-gloves are now off and the possible is increasingly whatever an official or bureaucrat wants to do. That means violations of the Fourth Amendment are held in check only by the goodwill of the government, which might have qualified as the ultimate nightmare of those who wrote the Constitution.

Thankfully, in an landmark decision on June 22nd, the Supreme Court ruled that police must get a warrant to obtain location information from cell phones. Hopefully, this will have a positive impact on law enforcement’s access to IoT data. 

Industry has no interest in regulating privacy in the IoT.
Consumers remain largely unaware of the problems.
Government is reticent to get involved
No one is regulating privacy in the IoT.

Why industry is not concerned with privacy:

A fundamental principle of the IoT is that products must be affordable. Profits from data must be maximized as data equals money. Attending to privacy concerns, cyber security, health, environmental impacts, and social injustices interfere with producing affordable IoT products.

Why consumers are not concerned with privacy:

Consumers would probably be more disturbed about their loss of privacy if they were aware of it. But most are not. And even if they were, there is little they could do about it. Privacy agreements fail miserably due to their complexity. With surveillance cameras, sensors in public spaces, and driverless cars, reasonable privacy agreements would be virtually impossible to orchestrate. Were privacy disclosed and managed, it would jack up the price of IoT products. There is no fail-safe, practical, and affordable way ensure our privacy is protected except by disconnecting. And industry in in no rush to change this. 

Surely government will step in to regulate privacy:

The European Union recently passed new laws regulating privacy. (For more on this please see, https://www.eugdpr.org/.) But in the US, there is an unspoken complicity between government and industry. In 2017, Congress voted to remove FCC privacy protections on our Internet use, and President Trump formed the American Technology Council (ATC) to promote “secure, efficient, and economical use of information technology to achieve its missions.”  What this council intends to do is as yet unclear, but chances are it wasn’t created to safeguard our privacy. More recently, the House passed S 139, a bill that further removes privacy protections. The Senate will vote on this bill shortly. If passed, it would result in “…broad NSA surveillance of the Internet…and the government will still have access to Americans’ emails, chat logs, and browsing history without a warrant.”

Schneier elaborates on the workings of complicity:

Data that’s illegal for the government to collect, they purchase from corporations. Corporations purchase data from the government. It goes into databases in the United States. It’s bought and sold. And profiles are generated. And those profiles are used, in both cases, to pigeonhole us, to make decisions about us, maybe whether we can get a mortgage, maybe whether we can board an airplane, maybe what sort of credit card offer we see.

Georgetown University professor of law, Julia Cohen, notes this as well. Author Julia Powles quotes her in an article entitled; We are citizens, not mere physical masses of data for harvesting:

In her lecture Cohen outlines the deal we have struck with the ‘surveillance-innovation complex,’ involving a deeply worrying complicity between state and private actors – ‘a mutually satisfactory game of regulatory arbitrage.'”

As things stand now, government is electing to largely steer clear of regulating the IoT so as not to “stifle innovation.”

FCC Chair Wheeler was unequivocal in his views on regulating the IoT:

Turning innovators loose is far preferable to expecting committees and regulators to define the future. We won’t wait for the standards to be first developed in the sometimes, arduous standards-setting process or in a government-led activity. Instead, we will make ample spectrum available and then rely on a private sector-led process for producing technical standards best suited for those frequencies and use cases.

 Even if government were to adopt a strong stance on privacy and Big Data, these efforts would likely not succeed. In the digital world. Innovation happens so quickly that by the time legislation is crafted and passed, it’s already outdated.

Policymakers are somewhere between three and 20 years behind what we’re doing. By the time policy is discussed, we’re on the third generation, and the reality on the ground overrides policy. Jim Waldo as quoted in Now arriving: Internet of Things.

Another reason for our government’s inability to regulate the digital world, is that government operates in a compartmentalized manner with each agency having jurisdiction over a specific area. Digital technology touches so many systems simultaneously that it defies regulation by a single agency or branch of government. Schneier explains:

Government operates in silos. In the U.S., the FAA regulates aircraft. The NHTSA regulates cars. The FDA regulates medical devices. The FCC regulates communications devices. The FTC protects consumers in the face of “unfair” or “deceptive” trade practices. Even worse, who regulates data can depend on how it is used. If data is used to influence a voter, it’s the Federal Election Commission’s jurisdiction. If that same data is used to influence a consumer, it’s the FTC’s. Use those same technologies in a school, and the Department of Education is now in charge. Robotics will have its own set of problems, and no one is sure how that is going to be regulated. Each agency has a different approach and different rules.

Finally, the Internet of Things is a global platform. Regulations set in one country will not affect products manufactured in other countries. Schneier calls it “a domestic solution to an international problem.”

Even If governments and industry are not asking the following question – we should be: Will the supposed benefits of a particular IoT product outweigh the “downsides” – loss of privacy, cyber security risks, health harms from the increased radiation, impacts on the environment, social injustices, use of conflict minerals, and the vast increase in e-waste? If not, you may wish to do without this IoT product or platform. Enjoy the freedom of one less gadget to configure, one less instruction manual to navigate, and one less useless “thing” that will likely break and end up taking up space in a closet, and ultimately, add more e-waste for our earth to try to digest.  

In light of all the harms from the IoT, it might be time to disengage from the gargantuan IoT albatross that is suffocating the public and adversely impacting all life on the planet. 

For more up-to-date information about the current state of affairs on regulating privacy and big data in the IoT, see Electronic Privacy and Information Center’s overview, Big Data and the Future of Privacy.