The internet of things comprises billions of devices, people, and services and entitles each to connect through sensor devices. These sensor devices influence the real world by administering critical network infrastructure and sometimes may collect sensitive private information about individuals. Managing this data authentication of who can access the device data and under what circumstances it can be found and used by others is one of the major threats for consumers and businesses. So, the internet of things services deliver new privacy challenges in our day-to-day lives. Though information systems discipline addressed research in privacy to a great extent, there still prevails no robust approach for the inspection of privacy breaches in the internet of things services. This chapter provides a detailed view on the privacy concerns in various aspects and scrutinizes the challenges to be addressed to ensure that the internet of things becomes true in near future.
Top1. Introduction
The Internet of Things (IoT) is an interconnected network that consists of infinite number of resources like sensors and devices that are connected and it provides the value-added-services through the communications infrastructure. The IoT provides facility in such a way that it connects people and things whenever required from anyplace, with any device, by anyone at any time, through any network or service (Perera et al., 2013). The World of the IoT comprises an enormous variation of devices like smart phones, personal computers, PDAs, laptops, tablets, and other hand-held embedded devices (Razzaq et al., 2017). Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology allows microchips for communicating the identification information of the user through wireless communication. RFID readers are attached with RFID tags that help the users in recognizing, tracing and monitoring any objects easily. This is achieved with the help of RFID tags that are attached to RFID readers (Jia et al., 2012). Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), is another technology for IoT that uses several intelligent sensors that are linked together, which helps in sensing and for monitoring (Xu et al., 2014). In the recent advancement of RFID, with web technologies and the low-cost wireless sensors, the IoT has become a major field in connecting the various resources or objects with the internet and communicating as an interface between the machine-to-machine and machine-to-human in the real world. In addition, various technologies, methods, techniques and devices namely barcodes, smart phones, social networks, and cloud computing are combined along with the IoT to form a huge network for supporting the IoT applications.(Wang et al., 2014, Li et al., 2013).
The IoT is used in various real-time applications and one of the major application is in monitoring the patients in hospitals and old age homes (Harini et al., 2017). Though it is more fascinating with the powerful and promising applications, lot of issues will arise. Five key IoT issue areas are considered to discuss, some of the most important problems and queries concerned to the technologies and methodologies. The challenges or issues include security and privacy; interoperability and standards, legal, regulatory and rights, as well as emerging economies and its development. Out of these challenges the most important is making users to follow the privacy rules that are framed inorder to protect privacy. (Wu & Shao, 2011, Gessner et al., 2012, Oleshchuk 2009)
The users communicate or transfer information’s through internet or through wireless means, all the actions behavior and management of data in certain real time applications are traced, which becomes a major concern in terms of privacy policy. In several real time applications the data are exchanged between several resources like sensors or other devices and with users even without consideration of owners. Emergent of new technologies may increase this problem. Usage of new technologies alone do not pose the major problem but the way how the users, organizations and government use the application also plays a major role (Solove, 2006).