PassW0rd – 11th October 2017

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you like what you hear and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm. Hello and welcome to the Internet of Things Update, a password show about the devices and sensors and apps that make life easier cleaner and smarter. They work behind the scenes in our power stations, telecoms networks, air traffic control, everywhere that online systems make a link between the real world and the internet. We’ll be meeting Brad the toaster, the My Flow menstruation app, and cloud pets that give you a cuddle and a message from dad when he’s not at home. Along the way, we’ll stroll around the smart city and go off on safari in the internet of elephants. But first, a non-governmental health warning. If governments knew this, I wouldn’t need to warn you. The sensors and programmable logic controllers that make all of this possible— measuring, tracking, and transmitting data to a central system— these gadgets are not secure. They can be hacked accidentally or on purpose, and that can lead to catastrophe. Who says so? Joe Vice, that’s who. He’s provided oral and written testimony to 3 US House subcommittees, 1 US Senate committee, and a formal statement for the record to another US House committee. He’s also responded to numerous U.S. Government Accountability Office information requests on cybersecurity and smart grid issues. A registered professional engineer in the state of California, Joe is also a certified information security manager and holds a certification in risk and information systems control. So he should know.

Speaker C: It’s not clear precisely what the hell’s going on yet. You know, what you’ve got is an industry waiting with bated breath to have something really bad happen somewhere else so that they could say, see, and then basically go, you know, get all of this money. Okay.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, but I mean, the issue with all of this is the critical national infrastructure has been in a pretty parlous state forever.

Speaker C: It still is. And it isn’t changing. You know, literally when I was in San Francisco yesterday, yesterday, I’m talking to one of the major equipment vendors who’s huge in the UK, huge. They had not thought about the fact that the sensors have no security. This was yesterday.

Speaker A: I mean, the issue is surely that the companies, the utilities, are working on the basis that they will gradually replace that thing? No, no.

Speaker C: And by the way, what are they going to replace it with? The newest— the new sensors don’t have any authentication or security either. See, this is one of the real roots of misinformation. You know, they’re making it sound like the only reason where we are is because we have the old stuff. Well, the old stuff was security agnostic. It was basically dumb. And people added some remote access. Well, the new stuff is cyber alive from day one. It was designed that way. The new stuff is actually worse than the old. We’re another generation from actually having secure stuff come out. You talk to all the IT people, it’s, well, that’s because you got all of this. All the old stuff, most didn’t even have a way to access it. We added it.

Speaker A: Yes, but that was—

Speaker C: The new stuff is designed with it.

Speaker A: But surely the new stuff has also been designed with space enough to run security programs on.

Speaker C: Not, not, not true. Not when you talk about things like sensors and actuators and drives. Not true.

Speaker D: Right.

Speaker A: So you’re saying that the PLCs, the PLCs do, but that they can quite easily be fooled by—

Speaker C: you can fool them, but you get down to the sensors, actuators, and drives, they have no security in them at all. Period. Period.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker C: None.

Speaker A: Okay, but surely then that means, Joe, that even more money will have to be, uh, yeah, yeah, or you basically say you can’t put those on networks. Surely what’s the imperative behind putting them on networks is money because productivity and information, which are tied together.

Speaker C: Anyways, it’s a very different theme, if you will.

Speaker A: Yeah, but they’re being put online so that they can be maintained remotely. So it makes it cheaper to look after them.

Speaker C: And also, so that earlier, as we did that by using things like dial-up modems. Okay.

Speaker A: But the other reason for— yes, but you don’t need a dial-up modem. You can, you can look at the whole network on the internet. But the other, the other reason is so that those people who are looking to buy electricity on the spot market can look through.

Speaker C: Yeah, but don’t forget, stop looking at it as if this is electric. This is everything. There’s something unique about electric.

Speaker A: No, I know. I’m not saying that. I’m saying that the entire infrastructure, whether it be water, electricity, whatever you want to call it, anything doesn’t matter. I mean, here in the UK, we have lots of privatized utilities. I’m sure you do in America.

Speaker C: Oh, God, yes. It’s mostly.

Speaker A: Yeah. And so, you know, there are people, you know, looking to get that information oversight and they want it quickly. Trying to use it to dial up individual components using a dial-up modem would take a little time, wouldn’t it? I’m not suggesting— I’m not saying that that’s a good reason, Joe. I’m not— I’m not being an apologist for it. I’m just saying—

Speaker C: I’m just saying that that’s, you know, that’s kind of what it is. That’s all.

Speaker A: It’s worrying enough that our national grid and phone networks rely on sensors that are too small to allow room for any security systems. What that means is they don’t have enough space on the chip. So is there a danger that these risks might also be built into our smart cities of the future? Alan Mayo, who’s advising the Royal London Borough of Greenwich and the Botswanan capital Gaborone on these matters, admits that security is crucial. A smart city is not smart if it’s vulnerable to cyberattack. That’s why in all the basic work that central government’s doing, it is underpinned by the issue of cybersecurity at the very highest levels. And we as a council take that very seriously, that it would be a catastrophic failure if our systems were to go down due to cyberattack, because why would people have confidence in the system if it is, if it’s so vulnerable. And we have to guard against that and treat that as the first priority. That’s the first building block, actually, of a smart city. It’s something of a paradox, isn’t it, that there is now a massive skills shortage in cybersecurity? We’ve been talking about AI wiping jobs out, yet there is a shortage across Europe of 500,000 people to work in cybersecurity? I think what you’ll find across the whole ICT industry, there is, there are significant shortages, and government needs to raise awareness in schools. No, we have to address this just as we need to address things like high-level software skills as well. But, but no, you’re right, cybersecurity offers very good employment to people with that aptitude attitude for it, but it’s not everybody who necessarily wants to go into the cyber security field. And just as a smart city street will know that it’s you and not someone else who’s walking along it, so too will your workplace tools and smart home gadgets. Sentient tools are the next big thing according to leading analysts Frost Sullivan. Tools that are an extension of ourselves. In this case, sentience is both the ability to sense the world around the tool, but also to process, understand, make meaning, and communicate with that world. To be able to effectively interact with that world, the tool needs to be socially aware of the person it’s working with. It must understand the person as an individual so that it can more effectively communicate. To find out what that means for our jobs and homes, I’ve been talking on the line to Texas with Frost Sullivan’s Global Research Director for the Internet of Things, Dilip Sarangan.

Speaker B: We’ve been looking at obviously all the different technologies, the different things that are actually going on in the IoT space, and one of The things that we’re finding more and more of is the integration of traditional definition of IoT used to just be connecting devices. But now when you look at what IoT has really become, it’s about bringing together data analytics, security, connecting devices, or ubiquitous connectivity with other things like artificial intelligence and augmented reality, et cetera. All of these things are starting to come together. When you put that AI, big data analytics, and connecting devices together, you’re starting to see more and more solutions being developed that have the ability to really become more intelligent. And with that intelligence comes the ability to be a lot more cognitive or predictive in terms of how some of these systems are going to behave, as well as the different types of incidents and alerts And with the processes that really go into making sure that these devices perform really well and can operate in an environment where you don’t necessarily need to have human intervention for a lot of the day-to-day operational tasks, you start seeing more and more intelligence going into these devices that actually enables that predictive capability as opposed to just looking at things from a very Looking at things from the background, because now that— and really it is about bringing together all of these different disparate technologies to perform together to make sure that IoT actually fulfills that promise of being able to improve costs or reduce operational expenses, as well as being able to generate future revenues in some way, shape, or form. So what in it— essentially you’re saying is that the Internet of Things really is just an Internet of sensors, and that there could be information that you may be getting, say, from your toaster or from your fridge, which might be sort of toaster-specific, fridge-specific, but it may also have some other value when interpreted against the context of other sensors. Yeah, and that’s more true in the enterprise or the business environment than it is with consumers. With consumers, really a lot of it is about convenience, right? When you look at like the connected fridge, for instance, basically it performs a few specific functions related to it, the intelligence piece of it where, you know, you can potentially find out like, hey, I’m running out of milk. So it’ll send you a text message or something like that. Or if you’re at the store, You can potentially turn on the camera that’s on the inside of the fridge that shows you all the things that you have, that you don’t have, and what you need to buy, and gives you an idea of what you need to purchase.

Speaker A: Taking sentience one step further, Simone Rebordengo, a designer who studied in London, has created a set of toasters that not only get to know their owners but also decide for themselves where they’re going to be, and how much toast they’ll produce. Like the other toasters, Brad cannot be owned. He can only be hosted by people who convince him that they will be a good host.

Speaker E: It was something like a real fictional service, so we, we created this network of appliances toasters for this example, and they were all connected to each other and they were able to figure out if each of them was used, how much they were used. And basically what happened is that because they all knew about each other, then we created this sort of peer pressure between products. And so this created the whole idea of how then, because these objects knew about each other, then they probably will figure out whether they were used more or less than the other, and this would change the way they would behave. So the idea was that because if a toaster would be used less than the others, then it could potentially decide to change place. And so the service that I created was a way for people to apply online for the possibility of having a toaster, but not necessarily for buying a toaster. So the whole network was actually a sort of self-sharing network. Where people didn’t really have buying power towards products, but they had more keeping power. So in order to keep the toaster, you had to use it, and if you didn’t use it, then someone from DHL would come and pick up the toaster and bring it to another person. So each toaster had a sort of happiness level based on how much it was doing compared to other toasters in the network, and based on this happiness level, it would change its behavior. So Part of it was leaving and finding a new owner, but another part of it was also just talking on Twitter and talking about his own situation, how lonely he was, and whether there was someone around that could use him. And so these were all kind of behaviors that were coded in the toasters and created a very interesting relationship between people and the objects. A lot of people, they were kind of following the toasters online to figure out whether they were happy or not. So some of them created parties to get their toasters to have more toasts done so they wouldn’t leave them. Some others realized that they could cheat, so they were just making fake uses. So it created a whole weird thing in which people were judged in a way whether they were good enough users of an object. And I think that was a very interesting experiment because what happened also is that A lot of people were trying to send me emails and figure out whether they could pay me to have the toaster stay with them, but actually this was a very weird experience because I didn’t imagine that people would take this so seriously. So the idea that somehow an object can tell you whether you are, let’s say, good enough for them changes a lot the way we interact with products and the relationship we have with them. Well, yeah, the project was in a way, yeah, it was somehow not really a joke, but more of a potential critique of what the future might be. So I didn’t really want this to happen in a way, like I didn’t, I don’t think that we need objects that necessarily complain, but at the same time, it’s very interesting whether if we have a system in which products or maybe a set of products don’t necessarily— you don’t have to buy them, but they might just figure out whether they’re useful for you or not. So I think now, like, with the sharing economy, we see a lot of single product scenarios where you have the bike, the car, single object. But I think it could be very interesting if— imagine that if you have similar to bread, the toaster, you have a set of products that come to your house and only the one that you’re actually using stays there, and the other one just leaves and finds a new home. So in a way, I think that it could be very interesting to have something similar, not maybe bread, the toaster, but like a new evolution of it. One of the reasons why I did this project and one of the reasons I try to show it is also because when we talk about sharing economy, when we talk about people changing their behavior, for instance, towards less consumption, it’s really hard to convince people unless they really want to do it. So in a way, having an object that does it by itself, it’s a little bit of a provocation. And this is actually the name Addicted Products came out of the fact that the addiction of the product to be used more actually goes against the addiction of people to consume more. So the addiction of the product counteracts the addiction of people and potentially creates let’s say, a more sharing and sustainable system.

Speaker A: As you can hear in the Vimeo video of Brad the toaster, it can cause heartbreak when a kitchen appliance decides you’re not giving it job satisfaction and finds itself a new home. No, it was just an experiment, and all the toasters have now been given away to permanent homes. One of them is in the Barcelona Museum of Inventions. Well, it’s no doubt been campaigning for Catalonian independence. After all, it is context-aware. You’re listening to Password on Resonance FM with me, Peter Warren, and after this you can hear A World in London with DJ Ritu. An autonomous network of toasters is still just a twinkle in Rebudengo’s eye, but sheep— sheep are already networking away thanks to research at the University of Lancaster in the northwest of England. Distinguished Professor Gordon Blair is using his flock to create a mesh of sensors that pass information to a data collection point. Data such as weather information, how much moisture is in the soil, the chemical composition of the grass, and where each sheep is choosing to graze. These tiny measurements can build up an important picture.

Speaker F: What we’re doing is we’re taking very cheap sensors. There’s a new sensor technology called Arduino, which you may have heard of. Arduino is very, very cheap, but it’s a complete computer in its own right, and you can interface to different sensors. So with that kind of technology, we can develop fairly cheap sensors which we can then put in a flock of sheep, and we can then put in various parts of the land to understand soil moisture content and so on. So we can deploy a reasonable number of these sensors across different geographic areas to get a feel for what’s really happening in the natural environment.

Speaker A: And so how are you actually picking this information up then? Because presumably you have the sensors on the sheep, there has to be a radio field that they’re moving through.

Speaker F: Yeah, that’s the tricky bit, and in many ways one of the technical challenges of the project. What actually happens is the different sensors form a mesh network, so they’ll all look out for sensors near them and work out what they’re connected to and form a mesh. And then when we want data out, they’ll communicate with something nearby, which will communicate with something nearby., and so on until it gets to a point we’ll have some base stations which are connected to the greater internet. So in that way, we have full connectivity and we can get this data in real time back to the scientists.

Speaker A: So in a sense, what you’ve done is you’ve turned all of the sheep into a giant network and an extension of the internet. So the flock itself, via a mesh network, becomes an internet.

Speaker F: Exactly, the sheep and the other sensors in the field.

Speaker A: So, and I suppose sheep are probably quite good for that, aren’t they? Because they tend to flock together and they do tend to keep together even in inclement weather conditions and not drift too far apart.

Speaker F: So they won’t actually stretch your mesh too much. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The project was actually misrepresented by some colleagues in the press as providing rural connectivity.

Speaker A: No, I understand now. Yeah, I mean, if I were working for the mail, that’s what I would do. I would say, so you’ve put together a Wi-Fi network, but it would be, I mean, basically it would be quite difficult to log on to your mesh network of sheep, wouldn’t it?

Speaker F: Well, it would be rather disastrous if you’re reading a very interesting email and the sheep decide to flock to another part of the pasture.

Speaker A: Well, that was the point that I was making. I was thinking yesterday was that I could do that in that case then with my Jack Russell, I could disrupt somebody’s communications by sending my Jack Russell to go and drive a sheep away. Absolutely, yes. Okay, right. I mean, it’s the obvious angle. So this is not anyway, the idea isn’t that you’re going to Wi-Fi enable sheep to increase connectivity in the UK so that over 100% of the landmass is covered by Wi-Fi?

Speaker F: No, absolutely not. I mean, that has been done in North Norway using reindeer as repeaters to get into remote locations, and I believe that was quite successful. But that’s not the aim of our project.

Speaker B: It’s to uncover interdependencies in the natural environment to allow it to be managed better.

Speaker A: Okay. And the final question for me is, how can the Internet of Things help in the battle against climate change?

Speaker F: Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, the reason scientists are trying to understand the management of the natural environment is because of, you know, changing circumstances coming about from climate change. There are more floods, there are more extreme events, and the whole environment is changing. And trying to understand these changes is absolutely core to what we’re doing. That’s a key motivation for our study.

Speaker A: And presumably one of the other things that this is bedrock technology, isn’t it? You could, you could put these sensors on sheep, but you could put them on African hunting dogs. You could put them on hyenas.

Speaker B: It’s really just the base technology, isn’t it?

Speaker F: Well, exactly. I think there’s some things that are really interesting about sheep behavior, but we would quite like to put them on cows as well to understand their behavior as well. But as you say, this is a very extensible concept.

Speaker A: Do you think, given that, and you do touch on a very interesting point, that there is a need for some sort of ethical framework over this? Because, I mean, the potential to map everything and to map everyone is enormous now.

Speaker F: Oh yes, I mean, the Internet of Things has generally been rolled out in cities and in smart homes, and I think sometimes it’s rolled out without any thought to the ethical dimension. What’s this doing in terms of our privacy? One thing I really like about this project is I feel it’s meaningful. You know, we’re doing something and trying to respond to climate change, as you mentioned earlier, and trying to understand the natural environment. To me, that’s meaningful innovation. I think some of the uses of technology in smart cities are much less meaningful, and I think as society we need to debate around the ethics of technology and where it’s going.

Speaker A: That was Gordon Blair. He’s got a research grant of £2.5 million to make the Internet of Things work for the rural environment and food security. And the IoT is saving the planet in other ways too, by promoting biodiversity. Gautham Shah has invented the Internet of Elephants. A charity to help people in towns and cities to relate to wildlife and care about conservation. It means you can chase your pet pangolin or grizzly bear around London, playing games as you get to know its habits.

Speaker D: As Gautham explains, we take data that’s coming from animals that are tagged all over the world, and there are literally thousands of animals that are studied by scientists and researchers, and they’re studied either with GPS collars, beacons in the sea, manual tracking camera traps, etc. We use that data to kind of create the basis for the storytelling and the basis for the gamification. To give you an example, we have an elephant in Kenya. We can track where it’s moving within Kenya, and then we create the games based off of that data. As in, you know, how far did it go, where did it go, where did it spend its time, how does that change on a season-by-season basis, what other animals What paths did it cross? How close did it get to villages? You can think about all the things that happen in an elephant’s life that you can objectively find out from the data of its movements, and then convert that into games that may require you to predict what it’s going to do next, require you to follow what it’s going to do next, maybe perhaps even require you to compete against that elephant in terms of, in terms of how far it goes. So an example of that might be, that I’ve got my Fitbit on or my Nike+ on and I’m running and I’m, you know, I’m keeping track of how many steps I take, you know, what I’ve done in a particular week. You can now start comparing that to what did an elephant do, what did a pangolin do, what did a frigatebird do, and start in fact even creating little fitness challenges for people based on the lives of these animals. Well, okay. The first model we’re working on is a little bit more aligned with the Pokémon Go type of experience. So we take the data of an elephant, for example, in Kenya, and we can map it and those same exact movements over London as an example, or any city in the world to create the illusion that the animal is actually walking within your town and within your city. And now the gamification of that comes in your ability to actually continue and track it, find it, match your virtual location to its physical location, complete and create missions in that particular way.

Speaker A: Can you actually then see pictures of these creatures? Can you see pictures of what they’re moving over? Presumably you can’t because you’re extracting this data from radio collars. It’s just geographical positioning information that you’ve got.

Speaker D: Yeah, so in this particular case, it’s geographical positioning information that we’ve got. Of course, we have imagery of the animals, we have imagery of the habitats that they’re, that they’re going through. But we’re not trying to give you a real-time, it’s not like elephant cam where the camera is sitting on the elephant’s head and you can see what it’s seeing at all particular times. I think at a certain point we’ll be able to sort of create a virtual world that allows for that if we can map out each of these parks into gaming environments. But no, it would be locational data and then we supplement that with other data like photographs, videos, et cetera that we’re getting it, but that wouldn’t really be real-time.

Speaker A: Real-time map to where they were at that moment. In terms of the Internet of Elephants, you have just got elephants interneted, or do you also produce information for, you know, is there a narrative for a lion, for example? Is there a narrative for a zebra that you’re also producing?

Speaker D: The name Internet of Elephants, it was something that was very catchy that people really liked. It just immediately got attention from anyone, and the name Internet of Animals or Internet of Wildlife just didn’t have it. But if you dig like just a layer deeper, you’ll that we’re quite wildlife agnostic. So right now we’ve got data on jaguars in Brazil, we’ve got data on wolves in Canada, we’ve got data on pangolins in South Africa, lions and elephants and zebra in Kenya. We’re still a little bit light on our Asia relationships right now, but we have seabirds that are flying over the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. So we really kind of think that the game is rich richness and our ability to kind of create a lot of interest in a lot of animals that may not otherwise get attention, you know, comes from us looking across many different animals.

Speaker A: So in that case then, in your narrative, you could tell that the zebra has stopped moving and that there are about 9 or so lions gathered around it, which wouldn’t look good for it, would it?

Speaker C: You could.

Speaker D: One of the things that we have to be careful of is as much as we would like to be telling these stories real-time through the data, there’s also risks associated with doing that. You know, unfortunately, there are people that would be very happy to know where exactly this lion is, you know, at this very moment, and especially for animals like rhinos and elephants, etc., that are, you know, that are heavily poached. In addition, God, if we’re ever super popular and everybody’s playing this game, you also have the possibility that people may try and influence the outcome of the game by driving their Jeeps or whatever, if they happen to be lucky enough to do that, to alter those movements. So the way we think about most of our games is that we delay everything by between 4 and 8 weeks. So it’s still now, it’s not like this happened 3 years ago. And, you know, it’s entirely manipulated in that way, but we do need, from a safety and security point of view, we do need to be able to, you know, delay it a little bit so that you can’t pinpoint something’s location literally at this moment.

Speaker A: That was Gautham Shah talking to me from Nairobi in Kenya. His elephants are real and each has its own IP address. But you can get stuffed toy elephants too. That are also part of the Internet of Things. They’re part of the CloudPets family.

Speaker H: You are so happy.

Speaker G: This is the best toy in the history of all toys. Why? Because, so Mom goes away a lot for work, and then if I press this blue—

Speaker H: Hi guys, I’m coming home soon, I love you so much.

Speaker G: If I press the blue paw, then It says the message that Mom sent or Dad sent. And then if I press the red paw—

Speaker H: I really love you, Mommy! It receives a message on my iPad and then it stores it in my iPad and it lets me know that I’m away. So while I’m away, what my kids want to say. So let’s just break this down really quickly because my kids have been wanting this forever. Yeah, so I have 2 kids. I gave them each a profile.

Speaker A: Yeah, I—

Speaker H: mine is Mrs. Blueberry, Liam’s is Mr. Blueberry. So here’s Natalie’s profile, right? I can play games. Play games. Well, we’re not going to play the games, but I can play games. Yes. Um, you can do lullabies, or you can send the messages that you’ve recorded to the bunny. So in this is my standard profile, your main account. This is where the parent would record the message. Let’s just do one. Ready? Watch this. I love you, my party people.

Speaker B: Be home soon.

Speaker H: I love you, my party people. Be home soon. So then it says, do you want to send it? Yes, I want to select who I want to send it to. I want to send it to Natalie and, and, and, uh, Liam, you send it to the inbox. So this automatically goes to the inbox. Now my husband’s iPad would get an alert because he has this app too, and it would say there’s a new message. See over here on my phone, it says you have 4 messages, 4 new messages. So at this point, he would go to the messages and he would say, Oh, there’s a new message from Mom. Let me send it to the Cloud Pet. And then when the heart blinks, if you watch the heart, the heart will blink and then— I love you, my party people. Be home soon. It is really cute. But it’s a really cute thing to get a quick message, a quick anything, a quick I love you to your children while you’re away. So that’s the long short. Somebody from The person from home has to send it directly to the pet. You can send as many messages as you want. I’ll give you cookies in 1 minute. And that’s it. Lots of fun.

Speaker I: Really cute idea.

Speaker A: CloudPets are the best. It all sounds very cute and cuddly, doesn’t it? But the CloudPets elephant is just one of a number of internet-enabled toys that have been hacked. As we reported on the Future Intelligence website, Australian cybersecurity researcher Troy Hunt found a database from the manufacturer of CloudPets, Spiral Toys, that had been left online with no password protection. It meant that 2.2 million recordings of children and their parents became available, along with 800,000 email addresses and passwords. Here again, the technology that’s meant to make life better, in this case enabling children to feel close to their absent parent, leaves them vulnerable. And it leaves them vulnerable to threats from online criminals. Daniel Castro is Vice President at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation in Washington, D.C., and Director of ITIF’s Center for Data Innovation.. He tells me we need greater transparency about how the personal data that’s generated by our things is used. For example, an automated heating system in the smart home can tell the energy company a lot of useful information.

Speaker I: Most people would probably not want to sit down and, you know, watch a half-hour video from their, you know, local energy utility explaining watch all the different ways their energy data is being used to make the grid work better. Maybe they should have the option to watch that, but I just don’t think every consumer actually wants to know all that information, even though they benefit from that information being used about them. So one of the problems I think that often arises in this debate is we tend to think about choices around data and choices around privacy from the individual’s perspective. And not necessarily from the society perspective. And so if you look at the community benefit, you might decide, well, the best set of policies is to allow data collection by default but allow people to opt out. If you look at it from the individual perspective, you say, no, people should have to opt in. But in both of those situations, the individuals that have strong privacy preferences or don’t want their data to be shared can still get that outcome, but in one you’re prioritizing the individual, and the other you’re prioritizing the community. And I think, you know, in so many of these different areas where there’s just huge community benefits, we should be prioritizing the community, because otherwise, you know, we won’t be able to obtain those opportunities.

Speaker B: Now, one of the interesting points is that old people, if they’re living at home, don’t mind being monitored. They don’t mind being surveilled if it means that they can live in their house for longer. If they have more independence. But how far does that go? Philips have been developing smart underpants and smart bras that can actually record information about what’s coming out of your body. Some people would get a little sensitive about that, wouldn’t they?

Speaker I: Yeah, I think those types of devices are certainly not for everyone. I think a lot of the conversation about aging in place or being able to be older and stay in your home even when you face certain challenges is an important conversation to have. And a lot of people would say, I would prefer not to share that information, but if given the choice between, you know, living in an assisted living facility or staying in my home and sharing that information, I would rather stay in my home and share that information. You know, maybe neither outcome is what their top preference would be, but that top preference might not be feasible. And so I think we have to find that balance and recognize that sometimes we’re not debating what’s the optimum situation, which is that everyone can live completely healthy lives and never need any kind of intervention, and say, well, that’s not the reality, so we have to work within the reality and constraints that exist in the real world.

Speaker B: No, I mean, that goes to the health argument that you’ve been talking about as well, doesn’t it? Obviously, if you’re suffering from a condition that is potentially life-threatening or whatever, to be able to stay at home and to be able to alert somebody so that they can come and look after you as and when they need to, a lot of people would say, well, I’m going to wear the smart pants, and you can get as much information from them as you want, aren’t they?

Speaker I: Yeah, and I think what is also interesting is that some of these kind of devices that seem more intrusive, smart pants or smart bra or something like that, over the longer term, the real question is, can we be building the smart home that you talked about, the Alexa or something that’s integrated into the home? And so it’s not something additional that you have to add or wear. It’s really just part of your environment to begin with.. So your home will know if you are healthy and safe, and it will alert people if you’re not. Just like, hey, we don’t say a smoke detector or carbon monoxide detector is an invasion of privacy. I mean, obviously it knows something about us and knows about the air we’re breathing, but it’s not an invasion of privacy. We consider that a basic safety feature. I think in the future, some of these products that basically can determine Are you safe within your home, whether it’s health, safety, or whether you’ve fallen or something else. Those are just kind of basic expectations of what we want our home to provide us. That’s a basic feature of a home. And so I don’t think it will be thought of as a particularly invasive aspect, just like we don’t think of a smoke alarm as being invasive.

Speaker B: A lot of people are saying that in the next 10 years, that people are going to become extremely aware of their data. They’re going to be extremely aware of the reason why companies like Google and Facebook have achieved the massive market capitalizations that they have. And they’re gonna start saying, “I want some money for my data.” So that if you are wearing the smart pants, you could sit there and say, “Hey, I’ve got this unique medical condition,” or it’s a relatively rare medical condition, “I want some money back for that.” for my information. Do you think that that’s something that will happen, and do you think that’s a viable model?

Speaker I: It’s really not a viable model in most situations, with the caveat that every situation, every use of data is different. There might be a certain group of people who are able to monetize their data, but for the average individual, their data, their individual data is actually not worth that much, especially by itself. It’s only in aggregate you start seeing a lot of value. And the problem with that is because it’s worth so little, let’s say just fractions of a cent, even if you tried to monetize it, even if you said, well, I’ll take even that, the transaction cost of actually making the payment, getting somebody’s authorization, it outweighs almost anything that a company would pay for any data. And so it just doesn’t make it viable. When you see companies trading data, especially when you’re talking about online advertising, they’re dealing in tens of thousands, if not larger, blocks of user data for the most part. And that’s at the scale at which this is useful. So there’s just not really a lot of opportunity to have people monetize their data in that sense. I mean, the way they’re really monetizing their data is in the benefits they’re getting from the system, you know, whether it’s health research or something else.

Speaker A: And as the Internet of Things becomes ever more personal, so the risk to our privacy becomes even greater. Apart from a Wi-Fi-enabled sex toy, you can’t get much more intimate than this.

Speaker H: Almost ready to take my tampon out.

Speaker A: Don’t want to leak over my new favorite jean shorts.

Speaker D: Wait, what?

Speaker H: How does she know how full her tampon is? Introducing myFLOW, the world’s first tampon monitor. Our aim is to empower women through insight and to obliterate the period anxiety that plagues virtually 51% of the world at some point in our lives. We’re here to bring peace of mind, period. Myflo is a tampon monitor that lets you know when your tampon’s full and needs to be changed. Just insert your tampon as normal, feed the tail into the monitor, and clip your flow monitor onto your waistband or underwear. The flow monitor will light up to show you’ve successfully connected and begin transmitting data to your phone. You can use your app to customize your notification timing and text. And to monitor your period and stats on both granular and monthly levels. When you’re not using it, the monitor slides onto a keychain for easy storage, so it’s always there when you need to check your flow. We’re myfLO, and we’re looking to obliterate period anxiety with our tampon monitor. We want to bring the quality, convenient experience to women everywhere Because believe it or not, virtually every woman you know has a menstruation horror story to tell.

Speaker D: Building Myflo has brought us on a journey to experts all around the world.

Speaker B: From California to China to Bulgaria.

Speaker G: And now we’re ready to use our insight to bring you insight.

Speaker A: That’s the Myflo, a prototype sensor that beams a message to the app on your smartphone to tell girls and women when they need to change their tampons. There’s also a new gel-based sanitary pad invented by Julia Tomasello. It helps you to measure and grow your own vaginal flora to help fight bacteria that can cause thrush and cystitis. Surely it must be this sort of thing that the University College of London Cyber Security Research Centre has in mind for Sir Nigel Shadbolt’s project investigating ethical data handling for very personal devices. Sir Nigel’s a government advisor, co-founder of the Open Data Institute, principal of Jesus College Oxford, and the former research partner of internet pioneer Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Data privacy is very important to him. He may find other delicate matters in the Internet of Women’s Things, a new movement that aims to create smart gadgets for women, mothers, and carers. Password reporter Charlotte Roundtree has more on the IOWT.

Speaker G: The Internet of Women’s Things is quite a broad title, so some people might say that the Internet of Women’s Things is those things that are specifically to biological women, such as health apps, ovulation trackers, things that really only have function to women. Something like Natural Cycles, which is a Health Board certified contraceptive. It’s a Wi-Fi enabled thermometer and it connects to an app on your phone to to offer you days where you’re fertile and where you’re not at risk of getting pregnant, or on the flip side, to help you get pregnant if you are family planning. But other people might consider things designed with women in mind, such as safety apps, fitness apps, wearable technology— they might consider these the internet of women things, but realistically there’s nothing stopping people that aren’t women from using them.

Speaker A: I mean, some of this stuff, I mean, I can see why people are talking about protecting some of this data, because some of this data is going to be— it’s very invasive, it’s very personal, it’s very internal, isn’t it?

Speaker G: It definitely is, and I think that will make some people very uncomfortable. Naturally, people are very comfortable giving away this information because they think it’s just a machine, it’s not going to matter, and I do think that’s dangerous. We have to have an awareness of where this data is going, how it might be used and sold, and how It might not be entirely safe for us to give everything to our computers.

Speaker A: It’s an interesting point, isn’t it? Because some people will say, why is there a need for some differentiation or discrimination like this? But in a sense, this is the differentiation and discrimination over a particular gender’s data. Do you think that women have a different way of using data, or that it will come, that there will be a different way of using data than men?

Speaker G: There definitely is. I think realistically, the sort of data that women are giving these apps particularly health apps, is something we feel very personal about, is something that because of society we feel very uncomfortable having other people know about. There is a worry that I have with natural cycles is that coercive pregnancy isn’t impossible. It has happened, it, it does happen where men, partners, will mess with a woman’s reproductive health because it suits them and not the woman. And I don’t think it’s impossible to say that If you have a thermometer that is telling you when and when you’re not fertile, maybe it wouldn’t be that hard to hack or to alter.

Speaker A: And that, that use of data, that, that’s something that people haven’t really thought about. They haven’t thought that you could, you know, be vulnerable just because of your gender and vulnerable to a particular intent from a hacker.

Speaker G: I don’t think there’s been enough interest in finding out just how dangerous this kind of data mining could be based on gender, there’s nothing stopping women-specific apps from being exploited.

Speaker A: Hmm, it’s fascinating, isn’t it? I mean, if women have Internet of Things objects that only cater to them, surely there must be some that only cater to men too?

Speaker G: Well, I would have thought so, but no. I’ve looked and I’ve looked, but men are almost being left behind in the IoT. We’re tracking our fitness, we’re tracking our health, we’re tracking how much we might be weightlifting or eating, and yet men aren’t showing quite as much interest, or companies aren’t showing quite as much interest, in tracking men’s health more specifically in the way that they are women’s. And maybe that’s because men aren’t quite as comfortable doing that, maybe it’s because men are socialised not to do that, not to feel unwell. But not knowing what’s going on with your body, it isn’t smart. Particularly when women are just becoming more and more able to track and keep check of their bodies and how healthy they are.

Speaker A: Thanks, Charlotte. And you can find out more about the ramifications of the internet of things, women things, elephant things, and everything at our website, Future Intelligence. What comes next? Well, we’ve heard about sentient tools, and Google’s chief evangelist, Vint Cerf, made a long speech recently pleading for interoperability, so that all technological things can talk to each other and be compatible. And when you move home, you don’t have to switch to a whole new set of different things. Vint Cerf also believes we’ll soon have connectivity deeply embedded in everything, so we won’t need an external remote controller or app. Instead, we’ll issue voice commands. As if we were giving orders to a servant or slave. Google’s rival Mozilla is already onto it. They’ve decided that the Internet of Things is too exclusive, and they’re trying to open source it, open up the code so that the new startups can afford to join in with this latest technology boom. They’ve made an app called Common Voice where you can donate your own voice by reading lines from books into your smartphone or laptop. Or you can verify that the voice is intelligible by playing it back and clicking yes or no. The voices and quotes are fairly random, but they will teach the things how to respond.

Speaker C: It’s not easy to find a philosopher’s stone, said the Englishman. The other son was a poet and delighted all of Rome with his beautiful verses. He told me I should try to do so. ‘Well, then, why do we need all these books?’ the boy asked.

Speaker D: He decided to stay right there and await his return.

Speaker A: ‘But there’s a tribal war,’ the boy reiterated. ‘I’m going to Tacoma to interview a 91-year-old in an assisted living center.’ ‘And one can always come back.’ One can always come back. So no doubt we’ll come back to this theme of the Internet of Things in future episodes of Password, until the phrase starts to sound quite silly, because the internet and all the things in the world will be as one. Futurist Mikko Hypponen of the Finnish ethical security company F-Secure foresees that this transformation is coming soon.

Speaker B: When people, especially when consumers, think about how everything is going to become a computer, they miss why this is happening and how it is happening. What they think about is the kind of IoT devices they see in stores today. Smart TVs, maybe smart washing machines. IoT devices where the internet features are visible to the user, and user actually gets some kind of a benefit from the fact that it’s a smart device. But this is going to change as the price of electronics to turn a dumb device to smart device plummets. Eventually almost any home consumer device will be online and they will no longer be visible to end user as smart devices. They will look like dumb devices but they actually will be smart. They just offer no features for the consumer. And the real reason for them being online is to be able to call home and report analytics to the company that built the device. So what sort of devices are you talking about there then? Toasters, that sort of thing? Eventually anything that uses electricity. So yeah, toasters, light bulbs, anything in your kitchen, your bed if it’s a controllable bed. The analytics, I mean, all these companies have been to Gartner briefings where they’ve been told over and over again that data is the new oil. And they look at Google and Facebook making billions out of analytics, so they want to collect analytics. They want to collect the oil. And it’s clear that some of it is useful to companies. Just the fact that you know physically where your customers are, just the fact that you know when they use your product, how often do they use your product, how often does your product fail. This is valuable information, and this is the main reason why the IoT revolution is going to happen, whether we like it or not. It’s not really a question whether consumers will buy devices with IoT features. It’s the fact that when the price of the IoT chip will be couple of cents, which it will be, or couple of pennies, which it will be, the device manufacturer will add this functionality to devices. Even though they don’t really need internet connection from the consumer point of view. So the Internet of Things isn’t just going to be the devices in our homes. The Internet of Things is going to be sensors everywhere, isn’t it? There will be sensors in fields so that people can collect information about rain flow, about nutrients in the soil. There will be sensors in the roads. There will be. One of my favorite examples of this is a Finnish company which which has a tagline, “The Internet of Bins.” They actually build sensors for trash cans. They actually have these online. They are tweeting trash cans on the Internet, which sounds like a joke, but actually is very useful because they mostly measure things like temperature and location and how full is the bin. Then they can use machine learning to learn the best possible collection routes and times and only empty the the bins when they really need to be emptied and they will optimize the route. What’s interesting about this is that we’ve all seen movies about people having an uprising against the robots, like, you know, Terminator. Okay. So when we think about people fighting the robots or people having an uprising against the robots, we think about Terminator. But what’s happening here with these trashcan monitors is an example of a real human uprising against robots, which is happening today. This particular company started to have an unusually high amount of failures with their sensors. They were going missing, they were being broken, and they couldn’t figure it out why until they put a CCTV to record some of the trash cans that they were being monitoring. And what they found out was that the trash can lorry drivers were breaking the sensors. And this is the human uprising against robots, because these humans, these trash men, they used to be running their route once a week, and then these sensors came around, and now they run the route once a month. They lost you know, 75% of their job because of these goddamn censors.

Speaker A: And they’re fighting back. They’re fighting back, just like the Luddites in the 19th century. But the things persist, and the things will persist. Password was produced by Blue Buffery and written by Jane Wyatt. The reporter was Charlotte Roundtree. And I’m Peter Warren. We’ll be back with another edition of Password on Wednesday the 8th of November. To discover more about the ramifications of technology on our society, go to our website, www.futureintelligence.co.uk.

Speaker B: Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Speaker A: This program has been brought to you by Resonance 104.4 FM. If you liked what you heard and want to support our work, please make a donation at fundraiser.resonance.fm.