Whoa, hold on, Earth: Wolfram's discovered the 'Internet of Things' Wolfram Research likes big datasets, and there's a growing number and variety of Internet of Things connected devices, so it's a natural pairing really: the company ha announced a project to create what it calls a “definitive, curated, source of systematic knowledge about connected devices”. In fact, the company's ultimate …
You forget that this makes the paranoid among us (including myself) worry about how much easier it will make the job for NSA, GHCQ, track us. As well as the more savvy criminals. Might as well just go ahead and publish my IP addy's, passwords, accounts, what time I leave the house, the route I go, etc. I imagine it will even keep track of what I took from the refrigerator.
I suppose that resistance to this will be futile?
You won't have to publish anything. Your car will report that its left the driveway, the garage door will close, the thermostat will drop 10 degrees (unless you have tropical fish, and then it will drop the rest of the house by 10 degrees and keep the room with the fish unchanged) and an SMS will be sent to the local thieves guild.
What's no to love?
"I still cannot see any *actual* benefits..."
It depends on who the benefits are for and who is doing the tracking.
If my house kept tabs of whether I was in or not, it could save me money by lowering the heating as described. It would also know if certain things of my choosing happened, that I should be informed - window left open, phone call from particular people, break in and so on.
If it was some bunch of corporations, not so beneficial though. If it was my *local* police, they might be interested in someone else hanging around my garden. Not so sure about spooks and other government officials and I am definitely against the idea of foreign (eg US) spooks and other criminal organisations like the NSA having any information.
"If my house kept tabs of whether I was in or not, it could save me money by lowering the heating as described."
Is a programmeable thermostat beyond you?
Admittedly for unexpected movements you'd be saved the effort of turning the heating on or off, but for short term movements you'd save nothing because the thermal mass of the house and heating makes the system too slow to respond to you going out the house for twenty minutes.
If the summary benefit of the whole internet of things is relieving the idle of the need to program their heating, or switch it on or off as required, then I have to ask why bother?
If the summary benefit of the whole internet of things is relieving the idle of the need to program their heating, or switch it on or off as required, then I have to ask why bother?
Agreed. Nearly every argument I've seen in favor of the Internet of Crap has claimed a feature I don't want, and could achieve anyway with the non-Internet-connected home-automation systems that have been around for decades, should I be interested in doing so.
Are there potentially interesting results from processing all that data, as Wolfram suggests? Sure. Computational geographers and others have been doing this sort of stuff for years, and it's led to some informative analyses. But the benefits are hugely outweighed by the risks and costs (such as the increase in pointless traffic tying up the infrastructure).
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