Privacy, Algorithmic Discrimination, and the Internet of Things

Related Areas

Current research agendas focus on the IoT ecosystem – networks of physical objects embedded with the ability to sense, and sometimes act upon, their environment, as well as related communication, applications, and data analytics (Gartner, 2014). The IoT is often mentioned in relation to other, overlapping research paradigms, particularly Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing, and Ambient Intelligence, research agendas that address the integration of myriad, heterogeneous objects into the everyday environment. Weiser’s (1991) vision of Ubiquitous Computing emerged in the late 1980s and emphasized the potential of multiple computers per person, in a variety of forms, to activate the physical environment and make computational intelligence an extension of human activity. Ubiquitous Computing research is distinguished by its human-centered focus and has increasingly addressed interaction contexts (Abowd, Ebling, Hunt, Lei, & Gellersen, 2002). The related concept of Pervasive Computing (Hoffnagle, 1999) emerged as a corporate vision at IBM during the late 1990s. This agenda has focused on the technical systems required to embed numerous, networked devices throughout the environment. Over time, the two research communities have overlapped, and the two leading conferences, ACM’s Pervasive and UbiComp, merged in 2013. Ambient Intelligence research has been guided by the European Union’s Fifth Framework Programme (Information Society Technologies, 1998-2002) and focuses on embedded devices, particularly those in smart homes, which are context-sensitive and tailored towards personal needs. While the IoT overlaps technical developments in these related areas, it is distinguished by several concepts. These include 1) goals for an architecture that provides billions, or trillions, of heterogeneous objects with unique identifiers that allow them to interact over a global network; and 2) an emphasis on machine-to-machine (M2M) communication. Although all of these paradigms tend to focus on near-term visions of potential future environments (Dourish & Bell, 2011), the IoT is already manifest in various ways today.