Five ways you can future-proof your IoT devices
Here is how you can use your Internet-of-Things devices and gadgets without the fear of them going obsolete/useless
The absence of regulation is what has resulted in the innovation of software we see today. But as hardware and software merge, as the shelf life of software becomes the shelf life of hardware, we are going to need a number of guarantees to ensure that the benefits keep outweighing the risks.
The chip-maker of the device says they just sell chips, the manufacturer says they just implemented the chips and put them on the board, the software makers build the software for maybe hundreds of chips, ignoring some of the extra features and weaknesses that come with certain components. The product ships and problems are found at a later stage either through design errors or implementation errors while implementing a piece of software that has vulnerabilities. And this is where we are today.
So, five things we would like to see as part of a basic set of guarantees when purchasing some of these products in the future:
Privacy and data handling transparency: Inform the consumer where the data is being saved to i.e. physical country, how long the data will be there as well as what data is being saved and to what level of detail. Give the consumer the option to remove all data produced by the device if you can prove ownership of the device.
Technology transparency: To the extent possible, inform the consumer about what technology is being used with regards to e.g. open source software and licensed software. Food manufacturers have to ensure the correct labelling of their product as far as ingredients goes. Why not technology for the individual parts or software components, at least to some extent so that consumers can make informed choices about what it is they can and want to use as their needs.
Security feature transparency: Is the product allowing management through a cloud service with two-factor authentication? Or only Bluetooth, Wi-Fi? Will it detect your neighbour trying to log on to your device? Can someone break into my device remotely? What kind of features the device has will hopefully in the future start influencing the buying behaviour of the consumer. If you want all devices to only use the cloud for remote control then that should be a choice that can be made by looking at the box
Planned obsolescence: A more difficult one but an important one. For IoT that is more sensitive or even vital, a shut down process should be explored to be able to shut down the device when it has exceeded its life or has been declared end of life. When reliance becomes dependence then planning is required in order to ensure that the benefits and added value of the product can be sustained. But for other devices that are basically enableand-forget, this implies being able to signal its remaining lifetime to the owner and thus implies knowing who the owner is. This would mean another potential privacy problem if the information is leaked. This can also lead to abuse from the vendor side. Printer and printer ink cartridge vendors were very quick in jumping on the planned obsolescence track being very quick in flagging printer ink cartridges as empty, forcing the customer to buy more.
Guaranteed life expectancy: When IoT vendors say they offer “life time support,” it is not your life, or the product’s life. It is the life of the company. Guaranteeing a certain number of years of product focus, updates, community support e.g. forums, as well as guaranteeing that the device will work is paramount. This means tracking the life cycle of the technology inside the devices, ensuring whatever cloud services are being used will still be there and c annot be interrupted or hijacked afterwards so users have to careful.