New Privacy Concerns Emerge as IoT Expands, Panelists Say
California has some of the strongest privacy protections on the book, FCC Enforcement Bureau Chief Travis LeBlanc said Monday at the State of the Net Wireless conference. The California attorney general had a broad mandate to protect consumers, and “I tried to bring that spirit with me to the FCC,” LeBlanc said when he came to the FCC from the California AG's office. The FCC focuses on kinds of cases and issues that matter to most Americans, including in areas like privacy and data security, LeBlanc said. The FCC has had “great rules” on the books for years on privacy, LeBlanc said. For cable and satellite, providers must take “all necessary steps to protect [personally identifiable information],” LeBlanc said.
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The FCC’s case against AT&T was part of a broader enforcement related to privacy and security cases in the past year, LeBlanc said. The FCC understands the sensitivity of personal information, LeBlanc said. With the number of breaches happening, the FCC realizes that there can’t be enough cops on the beat, he said. The FCC and the FTC have worked together regularly on privacy issues and have a regular privacy call once a month, he said. There’s good coordination between the two agencies that have a good working relationship, he said.
As IoT devices change to no longer include interfaces, a need arises for new privacy vocabulary, said Ellen Goodman, professor at Rutgers School of Law-Camden. The architecture for the IoT largely will be the same as for the Internet, but will be more heterogeneous, Goodman said. Privacy questions on opting out and PII will remain, Goodman said. Additional concerns include who gets to gather the data, what they get to do with it and transparency for algorithms used, she said. There's also a question whether an algorithm can be discriminatory, she said. Additionally, a hacked actuator doesn't lead to just informational harm, but also actual harm if a driverless car or medical device is hacked, Goodman said.
There’s an opportunity with big data to help determine whether a community is poor or healthy, but there’s a line between informing and using that information maliciously, said Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Multicultural Media, Telecom and Internet Council. In 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Council, a federal agency, forecast that one of the five greatest risks 25 years out would be the IoT, Goodman said. Though the intelligence council recognized the advantages of IoT, it expressed concern in 2008 that the IoT would provide channels for unauthorized surveillance, Goodman said. Big data is a civil rights issue, Turner-Lee said, because the question may surface whether humans can be implemented with a chip.
By 2020, 50 billion devices will comprise the IoT, Goodman said. The IoT market is expected to reach $19 trillion, said Turner-Lee.
One in five Americans rely on a smartphone for Internet access, said Aaron Smith, senior researcher at the Pew Research Center. Some of them can’t afford a full broadband subscription and are able to bridge the gap with a mobile phone, Smith said. About 88 percent of the time an individual who's using a phone is using an app, said Martin Price, Open X head-mobile product. On average, people will touch their phones 151 times per day, Price said. By 2020, 70 percent of all advertising budgets will be for mobile, said Factual CEO Gil Elbaz. He sees a trend of advertising being less invasive and blending more into a person’s life. With the right message at the right time on the right device, advertisers could potentially advertise less, Price said.
The media and industry blow privacy concerns out of proportion, but most consumers understand the value of free content and are OK with it, said Chris Cunningham, head of U.S. mobile at ironSource. Smith disagreed, saying consumers often don’t know their data is being resold. People think a privacy policy means data collected isn't going to be shared with anyone else, Smith said. He said people don’t understand their data is being shared or linked up with other pieces of data to complete more-comprehensive information.