Internet of Things in the United States

The Internet of Things and Privacy

John Beardwood, John ana Mark Bowman, in an article to Computer Law Review International, titled “The Internet of Things and Privacy: An Analytic Framework” (pages 140-150), wrote that one “of the latest emerging technologies that has arisen as a result of the existence of a free and open Internet is the Internet of Things (“IoT”). The base concept of the Internet of Things is that adding the means of communication to everyday objects, including consumer products that may not need a communication channel to perform their main functions, results in information being made available to the object or the consumer which in turn increases the utility and functionality of these objects.Both Canadian and U.S. regulators recently raised the spectre of privacy law infringements by devices utilizing the IoT (“IoT Devices”).

However, while these regulators have raised certain high level privacy law issues, what has been missing from the discussion is a useful analytic framework which can be used, in each case of a collection of information by an IoT Device, to determine whether such collection triggers privacy issues, and if so, how those issues can be addressed. This paper endeavours to provide such a framework by assessing various forms of, and concluding upon, a definition for IoT Devices (II.); by reviewing a number of recent publications from Canadian and U.S. privacy regulators to highlight their perspective of the key privacy issues being raised by IoT (III.); and, finally, by providing a basic analytic framework to assess when and to what extent privacy issues are raised by IoTv(IV.).”