Adafruit is working on a few Internet of Things products, services and more – we’re thinking carefully about the best and open way to do this as you’d expect. We started with an Internet of Things Bill of Rights.

We believe Internet of Things devices should all come with a well established expectation of what they will and will not do with consumer’s data. In the article we put together the start of what we hope will help this effort – Minimizing Risk Is Easy: Adopt a Bill of Rights

• Open is better than closed; this ensures portability between Internet of Things devices.
• Consumers, not companies, own the data collected by Internet of Things devices.
• Internet of Things devices that collect public data must share that data.
• Users have the right to keep their data private.
• Users can delete or back up data collected by Internet of Things devices.

Today we saw that Samsung’s data center caught on fire and their products check Samsung.com before being able to get online. You can see how this would usually be a good idea, if the device cannot reach Samsung.com then the device likely isn’t online… except when Samsung.com is offline, then everything breaks. Someone reverse engineered what their TV was trying to do.

For “Internet of Things” devices and services, there should be more checks than a single point of failure.

1 Comment

1. 

   Jeremie Miller

   April 26, 2014 at 5:54 am

   This very ethos is what the term “First Person Technology” from Doc Searls is all about (http://quartzjer.tumblr.com/post/80375916256/first-person-technology) :), count me in

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