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Top1. Introduction And Background To The Study
The Internet of Things (IoT) is undoubtedly a subject of economic, social, and technical significance. The rise of IoT has driven mobile applications (mobile apps) development. As a result, in the consumer IoT (CIoT) space, any product usually comes with a smartphone application to either control, programme, or view what is happening with the product. Tiwary, Mahato, Chidar, Chandrol, Shrivastava and Tripathi (2018) point out that the consumer can download the required application using a smartphone, a tablet or a laptop. Through this application, the consumer can communicate with a centralised database and obtain valuable data about the environment. CIoT involves connecting consumers' electronic devices, homes, offices, cities and anything belonging to consumers' environments (Tahir, Tahir and McDonald-Maier, 2018; Tewari and Gupta, 2020). The IoT technology makes it possible to connect all of a person's devices to create a smart ecosystem or what is called assemblage (DeLanda, 2016; Hoffman and Novak, 2017), and thus makes a person's life a far more integrated one. Each of these devices has internet connections, meaning that people connect to devices via the internet. Such links and interactions come with personal data shared with the mobile apps developers and their partners or any other stakeholders.
Many scholars agree that the biggest threat in CIoT is the security of the assemblage and personal data. There is further consensus amongst scholars concerning the negative influence security concerns have on the adaptation of CIoT (Staunton, Adams, Anderson, Croxton, Kamuya, Munene et al., 2020; Palmieri III, 2020; Diamantopoulou, Androutsopoulou, Gritzalis and Charalabidis, 2020; Fowler, Goel, Hodges and Miller, 2019; ETSI, 2019). Personal data cover the already known information such as name, age, gender, nationality and more. In addition to the known information, personal data includes data generated by the sensors in response to human desires. For example, people may have desires to monitor their homes or health using CIoT solutions. In this example, the information generated by sensors in the house shows personal preferences and patterns and can predict future individual behaviours. Such data is still personal as it is related to the environment or the place where the person interacts with smart things and can inform and monitor behavioural patterns of the consumer interacting with smart devices. The data in question may reside anywhere in the world. Each country has its own set of laws concerning data privacy and ownership. Regardless of where the data resides in the world, the security of the CIoT assemblage and personal data security is real, and the internet has no boundaries. Shang, Zhang, Zhu and Zhou (2016) agree that studies have investigated the technical aspects of implementing IoT technology. Tewari and Gupta (2020) have identified challenges in CIoT as security. The present study explores personal data and assemblage security of the CIoT in South Africa.
CIoT is about a group of consumer-oriented applications where data volumes and rates are low. The smart devices and applications that control devices in CIoT are not safety critical. For example, in the case of a system failure or collapse, the life of the consumer is not in danger, and only customer satisfaction is affected. The consumer may experience the inconvenience, but the consumers' life is not in any way under threat. However, the safety of the CIoT ecosystem is of utmost importance to the consumers as criminals may steal personal data and use it in nefarious ways. This in contrast to Industrial IoT whereby the IoT technology controls factories, productions systems, and mining machinery, among other things. In Industrial IoT, systems failure can cost lives (Leevinson, Vijayaraghavan and Dammodaran, 2019; Plaga, Wiedermann, Anton, Tatschner, Schotten and Newe, 2019). In this study, the words "things", "objects" and "devices" are used interchangeably, and each word provides specific emphasis on certain points. In CIoT, things act and generate data without human intervention and finally learn new things through machine learning and artificial intelligence because of the continuous interaction that exists amongst smart things and between humans and smart things.