New Infrastructure Will Enhance Privacy in Today’s Internet of Things

upnorth

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Jul 27, 2015
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People navigating through the digital landscape of the Internet today are bombarded with notices about how their data is being collected. But in the physical world where Internet of Things technologies increasingly track our activities–few, if any, notices are provided. A team of Carnegie Mellon researchers just created an app and an entire infrastructure to address this. The Internet of Things (IoT) Assistant app, launched this week, is an app that informs users about what IoT technologies are around them and what data they are collecting.

Consider public cameras with facial recognition and scene recognition capabilities, Bluetooth beacons surreptitiously tracking your whereabouts at the mall, or your neighbor’s smart doorbell or smart speaker. The IoT Assistant app will let you discover the IoT devices around you and learn about the data they collect. If the device offers privacy choices like opting in or out of data collection, the app will help you access these choices. The app is available for both iOS and Android phones.

“Because of new laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), people need to be informed about what data is collected about them and they need to be given some choices over these processes,” says Professor Norman Sadeh, a CyLab faculty member in Carnegie Mellon’s Institute for Software Research and the principal investigator on the project. “We have built an infrastructure that enables owners of IoT technologies to comply with these laws, and an app that takes advantage of this infrastructure to empower people to find out about and control data collected by these technologies.”

 

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