If you are beginning to wonder just how much IoT you have in your life and whether you should be concerned about it, then you are off to a great start.
As we all know, anything that is constantly listening, tracking some part of our lives, or that we frequently use to access personal information or research is a potential security threat. How did Google know that you have a bunion and might want to discover ways to treat it? More importantly, why are you receiving ads in your email about helping someone work through grief when your best friend is dealing with the loss of a family member? How did they know you might need that information?
How indeed…
You are hanging out at the local mall and see a soda machine. You pull out your wallet, grab your debit card, and go to pay for your favorite, but there is a small screen advertising that new soft drink. Now you want to try it or not, but you realize you have just found another example of the Internet of Things (IoT) that you didn’t know existed.
IoT is all around us. The number of things that include some form of IoT is growing daily. Does your refrigerator have a screen that you can watch Netflix on? Or maybe you like to bicycle around town on your pedal bike that tracks your heart rate, blood pressure, and calories used through a connection with your Smartwatch? Does someone other than a family member answer when you call out the name “Siri” or “Alexa”? Are they pretty good at finding out stuff you are trying to learn about?
If you are beginning to wonder just how much IoT you have in your life and whether you should be concerned about it, then you are off to a great start.
As we all know, anything that is constantly listening, tracking some part of our lives, or that we continuously use to access personal information or research is a potential security threat. How did Google know that you have a bunion and might want to discover ways to treat it? More importantly, why are you receiving ads in your email about helping someone work through grief when your best friend is dealing with the loss of a family member? How did they know you might need that information?
How indeed…
IoT has either been around since the 1980s (remember that Coke machine?) or come into real use much later, depending on where you get your information. While the term “Internet of Things” didn’t come into use until the late 1990s, machines that could answer questions or monitor something without user input have been around since, like, forever. Cars have monitored their own workings and alerted us to imminent failure for a very long time. That’s your warning lights on the dashboard, folks.
Today, we almost expect to be constantly monitored, tracked, and catered to in our daily lives. But is that a good thing? Can we control how much information about our lives and activities is collected and processed for someone else’s uses?
Forty years ago, it wasn’t all that hard to keep your personal life fairly confidential. If you didn’t want someone to know what you did in the privacy of your home, you closed the shades. Your car didn’t tell someone where you were and how fast you were driving. A company in California didn’t have any real clue about the types of things you searched for in the library or how to advertise related products or services to you based on those searches. Your life wasn’t about sharing every little tidbit of your home and work life with a disconnected group of people, which sometimes happens today, even without your knowledge or consent.
All of the information collected today through various methods, crunched for meaningful minutiae, then disseminated to paying advertisers and users, can be BETTER protected. Still, it can’t be completely locked away in a vault.
So, what can you do? Really? Well, you can start by making sure that you pay attention to those items of technology that are in your life, including the technology that others use and maintain in their lives. If you have a smartphone and visit your friends at the local pub or restaurant, make sure you turn the phone off. It is good not to pay attention to your phone while hanging out with them, but it means that the phone can’t unobtrusively track your location and listen to your conversations. It can’t combine location data from all of your friends’ devices with yours to create a profile of what you all like to do and talk about while in each others’ company.
I want to say that this is NOT intended as a scare tactic to make you go full-on Luddite or destroy your connected devices. It is just information that you should be aware of and consider in your decision-making process when looking to buy new technology or talk about things in what you assume is a private setting. Awareness of what is going on can allow you to manage your information better and protect it to the best of your ability.
What should you do?
Let’s start with the easiest things first:
- Look at the technology you keep and use.
- Is it Internet-connected?
- How much control do you have over what it collects for information or transmits after collection?
- Can you turn off any or all of the features that collect or transmits that information?
- If you can’t turn it off, can you control WHAT it collects or where it sends it?
- If you work or play in a space that you don’t control, what technology is there?
- Ask the same questions as in the above section.
Once you have done this little bit of research, you may have some hard decisions to make. You may want to find ways to reduce or eliminate the amount of unattended technology communication that is going on. Your friends might want to turn off their Alexa system when they have visitors or when they are having a private conversation.
Investigating your technology use and how it may affect your cybersecurity is a good place to start, but what about where you work? Is there information collection and usage that you don’t know about that you may not be willing to have disseminated without your permission? You may not be able to change your work setting, but you can definitely work to limit the information that is collected about you or your workmates.
For instance:
- Don’t discuss personal matters such as medical issues, lifestyle choices, or financial matters within the professional setting.
- Don’t discuss that same information as it pertains to others. Protect their privacy at the same time you protect your own.
- If you must discuss such things at work, ask that everyone involved leave their devices in a lockbox or locker outside the meeting place. You can also obtain and use bags or boxes specifically designed to block any receipt or transmission of electrical communications. Think “Faraday cage.”
If you can work through the settings on your devices, you can also take a more technical approach to protect yourself.
- Look for the settings that deal specifically with data collection and communication:
- Can you turn them off, or limit the times during which they are active?
- Can you limit the data collected and transmitted?
- Check your device specifications:
- Does it actually communicate with an entity or another device outside of your personal or work network?
- If it does, can you block that communication without affecting the device’s usability?
- Can you limit such communication to only those devices or entities you trust?
- Does it actually communicate with an entity or another device outside of your personal or work network?
- Another way to protect yourself is to read the legal disclaimers and End User License Agreement (EULA) for the device, and the software that you install.
- Can you tell those that collect your information not to retain it?
- Can you enforce limitations on what they retain and for how long?
- What are your rights and responsibilities?
- Do you have to allow collection at all?
There are so many more ways that your life and information can be protected that it would be virtually impossible to enumerate them all here. Still, those mentioned above should give you a good head start and perhaps even lead you to some others.
Knowing is half the battle, right?
Northstarr Recommendations
When it comes to your security and privacy, Northstarr is determined to offer you the best and most helpful information or assistance we can. We would love to be the company that provides you with the knowledge and ability to secure your data and organization from the unintended consequences of a potential breach or loss of your privacy.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us by filling out the contact form on our website or by calling us at (888) 767-2210 to set up an appointment.
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