Digital Life Matthew Webster

The garage rang the other day to say my car had told them it needed some attention; it had gone behind my back and sneaked on me.

Odd as that may seem, it is all part of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IOT) – jargon for the way all sorts of unlikely items are becoming connected, so information can pass between them.

IOT has considerable benefits. In manufacturing, it links production lines with suppliers; in agriculture, machines in the fields continuously report the conditions all over an estate, allowing much more accurate planning and use of farm machinery.

In Spain, the city of Santander is trying out a massive IOT experiment. It is encouraging all inhabitants with smartphones to download a widget which then links to more than 12,000 sensors around the city. This combination delivers very accurate information about where people walk and shop, how they travel, and even how they use water. Sensors can report when rubbish bins are full and when grass needs watering. It should all make urban planning much more efficient.

That’s the idea, anyway, and other towns are watching. Guildford is already testing ‘smart’ traffic lights that respond to traffic. All this sounds fine, but I have two major concerns, which I suspect we will only really sort out by trial and error.

The first is privacy. While it’s true that the more information we have, the more informed our decisions might be, who owns that data? Some of it may be about you. Do you want to take part, however anonymously? You can easily argue that collecting mass data is irreconcilable with any notion of personal privacy. I’m concerned that the current approach generally assumes all data collection is a good thing, and that the time to worry about moral and security aspects is later.

My second worry is more technical: over the sheer scale of the network being created, and hence the scale of what can go wrong. Remember the first rule of computing: what can go wrong will go wrong. Once everything from rubbish bins to jumbo jets are part of a network, there’s the possibility of an unintended but spectacular domino effect.

There was a good example last December; the collapse of the O2 mobile phone network. It didn’t just affect mobile phones but many other things that use the network: including payment terminals, displays at bus stops, satnav systems and much more.

Despite rumours at the time that evil foreign hackers were to blame, it was just a stupid mistake. A bit of software at the heart of the system was not renewed on schedule; so it shut itself down as a safety precaution, as it had been programmed to do. The whole mess was caused by good old human error.

But the effect was just like the row of dominoes; one bit of a network fails, which causes another to be blocked and shut down, which trips over a third, and so on. Remember those traffic lights in Guildford? It’s not hard to imagine them being caught up in the muddle. The O2 failure demonstrated how dependent we have become on such networks. It proved how important it is that systems working in ‘the cloud’ must have a Plan B.

We do, after all, reap what we sow, particularly when we use satnav and IOT to plant the seeds.

Come and learn more about how to get the best out of the internet at my course on 28th March; full details at www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours