Do you care about your personal privacy data in midst of security!
As we are moving into better and smart world in a very fast manner with the advent of IOT ( Internet of Things ) in our daily activities right from getting up from bed to till go into the sleep mode in the night, we have found many ways to optimize our time utilization in executing our regular tasks with the help of internet based devices. However, at the same time, we need to put focus upon on our private data, that may be exposed to public unwarily and thus cause unnecessary invoked problems to our private life.
Generally, in most of the cases we are under the impression of securing data is perfectly all right in the hands of anti-virus tools/fire walls and do not require any privacy for our private data. Whereas, in many cases privacy is completely different from the security of the data.
The following picture gives better understanding of the privacy of the data in everyone’s life.
The security is about safeguarding of the data, where privacy is about the safeguarding of the user identity. As the days are proceeding, we need to be more and better concern about our privacy data and how to protect and store in local way. Based on research institutes available data, we can have the categorization of the private data in the following layers.
First layer – What you share:
The first layer is information, we actively feed into social media and other applications. We can control the data ourselves, if we choose not to share specific information, not to publish certain updates, not to upload photos and avoid sensitive such queries.
Username
Real name
Gender
Friends
Groups entered
Blocked contacts
Likes and Other reactions
Search Items
Uploaded photos
Fingerprints
Second layer – What your behavior tells them:
The second layer is behavioral data and meta data logged by our devices. Example, our current location, who we communicate with. It is possible to control this layer of our digital profile to some extent, but it requires real effort and technical expertise.
Visited websites
Keystroke dynamics
Ads clicked
Ignored content
Device location
Articles posted/clicked
Time stamp of any on-line activity
Number of interactions/posts per day
Shopping patterns
Third Layer – What the machine thinks about you
The third layer is interpretation of the data collected in the first and second layers by algorithms that learn, who we are based on behaviors and statistical collections. It is virtually impossible to control. Full access to data generated by algorithms if often not made available to the users.
Ethnic affinity
Professional relationships
Religious views
Political affiliations
Psychometric profile
High/Low esteem
IQ Level
Mental illness
Gambling
Mozilla has come up with a better innovative technology that you should have control over your devices and the data, that smart home devices create about you.
Mozilla web things is a new tool that follows privacy by design frame work, a set of principles developed by the Dr. Ann Cavoukian that takes users privacy data into account through out the whole design and engineering life cycle of a product’s data process.
Dr. Ann has given the design with 7 foundation principles.
- Pro-active not reactive; preventive not remedial
- Privacy as the default
- Privacy embedded into design
- Full functionality – Positive-Sum, not Sum-zero
- End to end security – Life cycle protection
- Visibility and Transparency
- Respect for user privacy
Mozilla has offered a solution by following above principles.
- It puts the data back in the hands of user.
- There are no company cloud servers to store the data from millions of users
- User data is stored in user’s home only.
- Backups can be stored anywhere
- Remote access to devices occurs from one’s within own user interface
- User’s do not need to download and manage multiple apps on their phones, and the data is tunnelled through a private, HTTPS encrypted sub domain that the user creates.
De-centralizing the data management gives the user privacy:
Web Things Gateway:
Decentralized distribution of Web Things Gateways in each home means that each user has their own private data center
The Gateway acts as the central nervous system of their smart home.
Smart home distributed data in each individual home, becomes more challenging for unauthorized hackers to attack the millions of users.
The decentralized data storage and management approach offers an advantage, it provides complete privacy for user data, and it securely stores the data behind a firewall that uses best-of-breed https encryption.
Decentralization:
Web Things embodies the mission to treat personal security and privacy on the internet as a fundamental right, giving power back to users
Decentralized technology can disrupt centralized authorities and provide more user agency at the edges, to the people.
Decentralization can be an outcome of social, political, and technological efforts to redistribute the power of the few and hand it back to the many.
Web of Things:
Web of Things is intended as a unifying application layer for the Internet of Things, linking together multiple underlying IoT protocols using existing web technologies.
A software distribution for smart home gateways, that allows users to directly monitor and control their smart home over the web, without a middle interface.
It provides a web-based user interface to monitor and control smart home devices, a rules engine to automate them and an add-ons system to extend the gateway with support for a wide range of existing smart home devices.
A collection of re-usable software components to help developers build their own web things, which directly expose the Web Thing API.
The framework supports the various programming languages like Node.Js, Python, Java, Rust and C++.
The system is gaining more momentum now, and it slowly spreading its wings in European countries, as the things are getting improvement and more user-friendly day by day, and this de-centralizing technique will become more penetration into the market.
You can have and establish your own secure and privacy data centre with the help of following link.
And, the good thing about it is raspberry pi foundation has given due recognition to this, and given a place on its website as well.
Please do check through the following link.
As Techsys IoT Labs involved in investing it time in R&D activities through its in-house section, it will help the people to further associate with them and then make a better services or products.
