What Is the IoT?

So, what is the IoT? There’s no single agreed-upon definition, but the term goes back to at least 1999, when Kevin Ashton, then-director of the Auto-ID Center at MIT, coined the phrase.⁶ However, the idea of networked noncomputer devices far predates Ashton’s term. In the late 1970s, caffeine-fixated computer programmers at Carnegie Mellon University connected the local Coca Cola machine to the Arpanet, the predecessor to the Internet.⁷ In the decades since, several overlapping concepts emerged to describe a world of devices that talk among themselves, quietly, monitoring machines and human beings alike: ambient intelligence, contextual computing, ubiquitous computing, machine-to-machine (M2M), and most recently, cyber-physical systems.

The IoT encompasses several converging trends, such as widespread and inexpensive telecommunications and local network access, cheap sensors and computing power, miniaturization, location positioning technology (like GPS), inexpensive prototyping, and the ubiquity of smartphones as a platform for device interfaces. The US National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee wrote in late 2014:⁸ “the IoT differs from previous technological advances because it has surpassed the confines of computer networks and is connecting directly to the physical world.”

One term that seems interchangeable with the IoT is connected devices, because the focus is on purpose-built devices rather than more generic computers. Your laptop, your desktop, and even your phone are generic computing platforms—they can do many, many things, most of which were not imagined by their original creators. “Devices” in this sense refers to objects that are not intended to be full-fledged computers. Fitness and medical wearables, cars, drones, televisions, and toys are built for a relatively narrow set of functions. Certainly, they have computing power—and this will only increase over time—but they are “Things” first and computers second.

As to the size of the IoT, there are many numbers thrown around, a popular one being Cisco’s assertion that there will be 50 billion devices on the ‘net in 2020.⁹ This is a guess—one of several, as shown in Figure 2-1.

Figure 2-1. Industry estimates for connected devices (billions) in 2020 (source: The Internet of Things: making the most of the Second Digital Revolution, UK Government Office for Science, 2014)

Segmenting the IoT into categories, industries, verticals, or technologies assists in examining its privacy risks. One categorization is consumer versus industrial applications, for example, products in the home versus oil and gas drilling. Separating into categories can at least make a coarse division between technologies that deal directly in personal data (when are you home, who is in the home, what are you watching or eating or saying) and those that do not. For privacy analysis, it’s also valuable to separate the IoT into product sectors, like wearables, medical/health/fitness devices, consumer goods, and the connected car. Similarly useful are verticals like cities, health, home, and transport. The smart city context, for example, implicates different privacy, governance, and technology issues than the health context.

The IoT is a banner for a variety of definitions, descriptions, technologies, contexts, and trends. It’s imprecise and messy, but a few key characteristics emerge: sensing, networking, data gathering on humans and their environment, bridging the physical world with the electronic one, and unobtrusiveness. And although the concept of connected devices is decades old, policy-makers, journalists, and the public are tuning in to the topic now because these devices are noticeably beginning to proliferate and encroach upon personal spaces in ways that staid desktops and laptops did not. Ultimately, the term will vanish, like “mobile computing” did, as the fusion of networking, computation, and sensing with formerly deaf and dumb objects becomes commonplace and unremarkable.