IoT and Privacy (original) (raw)

2022, Services and Business Process Reengineering

The expression Internet of Things (IoT) is mostly used to describe an ecosystem composed of objects connected to the network through sensors (but also satellites, GPS, microphones, video surveillance, remote-control equipment, etc.) that interface with the physical world and interact with each other, exchanging information on their status and the surrounding environment without the need for human intervention. The neologism (Ashton 2009; Weber 2009) summarises the transformation of the Internet into a responsive connected structure, composed by a crowd of connected objects. These so-called 'smart objects' are capable of gathering, processing, storing and transferring data, from which further information can be processed. For some time, IoT has extended beyond traditional devices such as tablets, computers, or smartphones to potentially include all objects: from everyday ones to implantable ones. IoT represents a new stage of progression for the Internet. It is a rapidly growing technology, which has already experienced a big increase due to the COVID-19 pandemic and will further explode with the transition to the 5G connection standard. Thus, a new stream of data drawn from smart devices will be generated. The infrastructure has undergone a significant evolution: from the Internet of People to the Internet of Things and then to the Internet of Everything (IoE). In the IoE, the connection is not only between objects (through the 'machine to machine' technology) but also between people and even animals, living together in a connected world in which they 'talk' through any data stored in a database. More precisely, the connections concern objects, objects and individuals' devices, individuals and other objects, and also objects and back-end systems. The physical and virtual world are no