Saturday, January 18, 2014
Beware! Big Data is watching!
In his novel, “1984” he predicted a dystopian future in which the government sought to control the populace by spying on them.
But 30 years after that story was supposed to have taken place, it’s not “Big Brother” we have to fear, but rather “Big Data.”
Since computers began integrating themselves into our lives back in the early ’80s, we have become so used to our near constant connection to the Internet that those of us who are actually old enough to remember life back in 1984 can’t imaging having to live again in that pre-interconnected world.
But our modern ability to have all of humanity’s collective knowledge (or depending on your point of view, cute cat videos) at our fingertips has come with a dark side that even Darth Vader would have feared. The rise of “Big Data.”
Big Data, for those of you not familiar with the term, refers to companies who track our every online click and use that information to compile a virtual personality profile of us. These dossiers are then used to either target us with ads or are sold to other companies anxious to get their hands into our wallets.
Now businesses collecting data about their customers is nothing new. It has gone on since at least the ’90s – if not earlier – with supermarkets using customer loyalty cards to track purchases and print coupons targeted to the buyer on the backs of register receipts.
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| The Nest Smart Thermostat |
I generally don’t have a problem with this type of thing, but what set the alarm bells off in my head was the recent announcement that Google – perhaps the biggest of all the “Big Data” companies in the world – recently bought a small company called Nest, which makes a line of smart thermostats.
Through the magic of the Internet, I can already see you staring at your computer/tablet/phone screens making that “so what?” face. But let me tell you why you should be concerned.
Nest’s line of smart thermostats are designed to learn your schedule, program themselves and enable you to remotely control them via an app on you install on your cell phone.
Again I can see you making that “so what?” face. Right now you are probably thinking, “I hate having to get out my 150 page manual every time I need to change the temperature or reprogram my current set-back thermostat!”
Well so do I, and I do like the idea of a thermostat automatically adjusting itself to fit my schedule. The problem I have with it, is with the Internet connectivity Google is likely to enhance in future models.
Remember Google is perhaps the world’s biggest and best-know search engine, whose name has already become a verb. It is in the business of collecting data on you. It does this every time you search for something on the Web, send a message from G-mail, watch a Youtube video and to some extent when you use an Android-based phone. So what makes you think Google is not going to be collecting data on you from its newly acquired line of smart thermostats and smoke/carbon monoxide detectors?
But what, you may ask, can Google really learn about you from just your thermostat settings? Off the top of my head I can think of at least a half-dozen things: where you live right down to the street address, what kind of heating (or cooling) system you have, how warm/cool you like your home and most importantly when you are home and away and when you’re likely to be awake and asleep.
Now I’m no conspiracy theorist and I do generally believe that Google does try to live by its “Don’t Be Evil” corporate motto. But let’s face it, Google is now a multi-billion dollar public company, that, like any business with lots of investors, is in business to make money. And the thing Google uses to make money with is our data. So to expect them NOT to use the data they’ll collect from the thermostats and other home automation products they’ll create is unreasonable.
How might they use this information? Image this scenario. Just as you are getting back from vacation, you get a call or text from some person or company you’ve never heard of or done business with before.
“Hello Mr. Smith,” it will say. “Welcome home! I hope your trip was a good one! We’re calling/texting because we see that your furnace filter is due to be replaced in the next three days. Well right now we’re offering a sale on filters especially made for your Acme Furnace, Model ABC123. And oh by the way, we see that your unit hasn’t been serviced in the last six months. For an extra $69.99 we could send a tech out to your home at 1313 Mockingbird Lane, Mockingbird Heights, New Jersey. From your schedule it looks like Fridays you get home from work early and we do have a 4 p.m. slot open. If that’s not good, we have Saturday appointments also. Since you like to sleep until noon on the weekends, we could schedule it at 1 p.m. if that works better for you.”
If you don’t find the fact that your house just told a complete stranger that you weren’t home and what your normal schedule is down right creepy, I don’t know what will. I try very hard to discourage even my own neighbors from knowing when I’m home or not, so my house won’t be a target of burglars. But with my house blabbing about my schedule to the entire Internet, I just might as well get rid of all timers for my lights and keep my doors unlocked.
Okay, so I’m exaggerating a bit, but the fact that my private schedule will suddenly be public knowledge is no exaggeration.
And I do mean public knowledge.
Because if the recent Target credit card hacking case and Edward Snowden have taught us anything, it’s that no data is completely safe. Make no mistake, the data coming from Internet-enabled home automation devices like these smart thermostats would be a gold mine to some hacker; low paid, ethically-challenged systems operator or even a government spy agency.
You think the Cryptolocker virus that struck at the end of last year was bad? Now imagine instead of locking up all the data on your computer hard drive and ransoming it back to you, some Internet miscreant hacks into your heating system on the coldest day of the year.
Want your heat back? Then send $25,000 to this PayPal account or freeze!
Attacks probably won’t be as blatant or obvious as that. Smarter operators or even our own government could just tap into the data your thermostat sends back to Google and use it to determine when you come and go. Then they could sell that data on some black market to burglary rings looking to target specific zip codes or use it themselves to break into your home when they know you will be out.
I realize all these things are pretty unlikely and there will no doubt be some safeguards on the devices to prevent exactly the sort of abuses I talk about here. But the idea that there will be some gadget or gadgets inside my house, watching me and learning all about my habits and reporting them back to some anonymous, faceless entity – even if it’s for totally “legitimate” purposes – is still creepy. It smacks of the exactly the kind of surveillance state George Orwell warned us about all those years ago.
It’s almost enough to make me want to go back to those carefree, pre-connected days of 1984.
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