Somewhere in Italy, I like to think there’s an old man sipping an early morning espresso at a café. He gets an alert on his phone, notifying him that I haven’t used my Nespresso for a day. Alarms go off, the old man sends a few terse alerts to other people and then goes back to sipping his espresso. He is, after all, the boss. Meanwhile, the minions rush around comparing my data to the rest of the Big Data that Nespresso pulls from everyone’s machine to see if there is a drop is use overall, and how that may impact the company’s bottom line.
I know that the old man doesn’t exist – at least not one who checks my personal coffee consumption – but the ongoing AI-infused Big Data analysis surely does. Welcome to the world of Connected Intelligence, where every device has part of a story to tell; and tell it does.
The story isn’t new, and devices have been spilling their silicon guts to their manufacturing overlords since we started connecting them to the Internet. Your computer has always sent little messages along the way but now we are getting into the realm of air fryers and coffee machines. Indeed, it is the expansion of the connected home that has truly opened the floodgates as we have moved from one or two devices (your mobile phone for example) sending little messages to potentially any device.
This is the deal we make when we add smart home devices: we get a device that turns lights off, ups the temperature or, in my case, opens the curtains and in return we tell the manufacturer all about it. We can, after all, choose not to use these devices if we want. The key is that there has to be a balance: I’ll share a little bit of data with the theoretical old Italian man, because in return “he” lets me know when it is time to clean my Nespresso, or other maintenance, and how to do it.
The latest data-leaking media frenzy relates to air flyers, with the suggestion that they “spy” on you. That’s a bit extreme, but one does have to question why you need an app for your air fryer. And, to that point, you can choose NOT to install the app, thus stemming the data leak – at least for one household device – while still having a working air fryer. Or at least, that’s the theory. A few years ago, I purchased a smart plug that demanded access to a broad range of my data, including all my photos. That was far too invasive (photos, seriously?) so that device was immediately returned to the store and I chose a different one instead.
But while I could choose to install, or not, the insidious smart plug app, I suspect we are all worrying about the individual devices rather than the collective. I have recently been inundated with ads for a women’s clothing store website that I can safely say I have never visited. But my daughters have; not on any of my devices, but rather on their smartphones running over my WiFi. The fact that I now see these ads means that my broadband provider is selling my data. So, regardless of what apps or devices I have set up, ALL my Internet traffic finds its way to various social media services to power the targeted ads.
But perhaps data sharing per se is not the core issue that drives media – and political – attention. Rather, there is a jingoistic focus: there is less fuss when we share data with US (or even Italian) based companies and far more ruckus when it is a select number of countries such as China. Take Huawei for example, which has been effectively banned from the US market. It’s unlikely that Huawei was grabbing any more data about the device’s owner than any other smartphone provider; instead, it was the fact that the company has possible ties to the Chinese government that caused the angst. And I suspect the same is true for air fryers and other devices. The country of origin is what triggers the concern, not the amount of data that we (somewhat) voluntarily share. And it also triggers the terminology in many cases, switching from “sharing” data with my broadband provider to an air fryer that “spies” on me.
Regardless, we should all know by now that a connected device comes with a Faustian deal and the best we can hope for is that the amount of data we share is limited. It would be helpful to know how much data will be shared prior to purchasing a device, of course, and while I do not expect packaging to start listing that any time soon, app stores do show the amount of data share that will occur. As such, it may be time to change our shopping research habits to examine the app data share before picking a specific device (air fryer or whatever) before the purchase.
In the meantime, I should probably make another coffee so the old Italian man can enjoy his coffee without an alert. Ciao!