Let’s face it, we’ve got 4G phones, wireless game consoles and smart TVs. And we’re getting pretty comfortable with all those interconnected devices and the cool one-touch control they give us over our world. Hey, we can finish a business report, start our car and tell our home DVR what to record for our evening viewing, all while standing in line at the post office.
That’s only the “smart” world beginning, though. On the home front, for example, just about every new thingamajig you buy—right down to your lowly bathroom scale—is now or will soon be connected to the web. It seems no gadget in our convenience-focused society will be too small to get its own Internet hookup.
On the face of things, a lot of that advancement is designed to help you save energy and get the most efficiency from your appliances. Like say, letting your clothes washer turn itself on after it determines when the best and least costly time in the day is to run—even if you’re off at work. Or a water heater that not only remembers when you usually like lots of the hot stuff, but can also shut the water off altogether if a leak is detected.
On the other hand, efficiency isn’t the only consideration. You can buy ovens that will grab online recipes and walk you through a quick cooking lesson. And refrigerators that tell you when to order more milk or, if you’re busy, help create a shopping list for your next trip to the market. And I wasn’t kidding about the bathroom scale. I saw an article about an Internet-connected home scale that kept track of a guy’s weight loss efforts, sending him smart phone updates with a graph of his progress. And get this, the brilliant weighing machine even tweeted the guy’s successes to friends on his Twitter account. And that’s only the tip of the ice … maker. Yep, all we need is Rosie the robot and we’ll be giving the Jetsons a run for their money.
But all these wonderful daily conveniences may just be coming with an unseen price tag we don’t expect. The truth is that all those connected dishwashers, microwaves, stereos and TVs might someday decide to spy on you. And don’t give me that doubting lifted eyebrow. This is as real as that GPS software in your phone that’s likely telling your cell phone company where you are right now.
Wired.com ran an article not long ago in which CIA director David Petraeus discussed the “treasure trove” of data that can be gleaned by any willing spy who wants to tap into what he called our “Internet of Things.”
“Items of interest will be located, identified, monitored, and remotely controlled through technologies such as radio-frequency identification, sensor networks, tiny embedded servers, and energy harvesters—all connected to the next-generation Internet using abundant, low-cost, and high-power computing,” Petraeus said at a summit for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm.
In other words, no need for James Bond to try and ply you with martinis while planting bugs in your phones and cameras in your flower pots. The same technology that’s in your Xbox and iPad and maybe your bathroom scale will let James keep tabs on all your day-to-day dealings. Why, he can even leave his tux at the cleaners.
Britian’s Daily Mail even suggested that, “Futurists think that one day ‘connected’ devices will tell the internet where they are and what they are doing at all times—and will be mapped by computers as precisely as Google Maps charts the physical landscape now.”
It’s an eerie thought. And it all could start with that new fridge sitting innocently in the kitchen.And here you were only concerned with how many pizzas you could squeeze into its freezer.
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