{"id":4247,"date":"2018-11-27T15:56:19","date_gmt":"2018-11-27T23:56:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/?p=4247"},"modified":"2018-11-27T15:56:19","modified_gmt":"2018-11-27T23:56:19","slug":"the-internet-of-things-could-be-great-if-only-we-didnt-let-the-tech-giants-own-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/2018\/11\/the-internet-of-things-could-be-great-if-only-we-didnt-let-the-tech-giants-own-it\/","title":{"rendered":"The Internet of Things could be great, if only we didn&#8217;t let the tech giants own it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Famous sci-fi author Bruce Sterling said it well in his non-fiction essay <a href=\"https:\/\/www.goodreads.com\/book\/show\/23209856-the-epic-struggle-of-the-internet-of-things\">The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The internet of things &#8230; is neither about internet nor things,\u2028 but a battle \u2026 for the control of property.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Too dramatic for you? Well, it&#8217;s prime holiday shopping season, and so I went browsing on <a href=\"https:\/\/amazon.com\/\">Amazon.com<\/a> for &#8220;home automation&#8221; products. Of the 23 products that showed up on the first page for me, 17 had, in their very title, a variation of &#8220;works with Alexa, Apple HomeKit and Google Assistant&#8221;. And exactly none of them indicated that I could open it, take it apart, repair it, connect it to something I could freely choose, or to the rest of my house. Only to Alexa\/Amazon, Apple and Google.<\/p>\n<p>This is very different from pretty much anything else I attach to my house. I buy a faucet: it attaches to any pipe I might conceivably have and if not, I can buy an adapter or apply a vise or blow torch to it. I buy a stove, a table, a banister, even a window or a garage door: it&#8217;s mine, there are no backdoors, no unnecessary third parties are in the loop, I can take it apart and change it any way I like. Is there any home owner who hasn&#8217;t fixed things in a way that the manufacturer definitely didn&#8217;t forsee, and probably wouldn&#8217;t condone?<\/p>\n<p>Those &#8220;home automation&#8221; products are a black box, which talk to a third party (Google, Apple, Amazon) that I did not invite into my home, I have no idea what they do, and I have no control over. If I installed them in my house and then said, &#8220;Alexa, turn on the heater&#8221;, and Alexa responded, &#8220;I can&#8217;t let you do that, Dave&#8221;, there is nothing I can do.<\/p>\n<p>We need to do better. We need internet-of-things products to be like other things we buy for our homes:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">controlled by us<\/span>, the customers and users, not by some would-be tech overlord in the cloud. This means we need to know what&#8217;s inside, how it works, and have the ability to change it.<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">not have back doors for third parties<\/span> we did not invite. Sure, service providers like a maid service are nice, they come and do work we don&#8217;t want to do ourselves, but I sure will not hire one that I cannot fire without tearing the house down. Why should technology products be any different?<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">not spy on us<\/span>. No, there is no reason to ship off the data from my thermostat to somebody else&#8217;s cloud before I can get at it (if I can get at it at all). What happens in my house needs to stay in my house, otherwise it&#8217;s somebody else&#8217;s house, not mine, and I&#8217;m just a guest. Bruce Sterling quote, anyone?<\/li>\n<li><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">make all the collected data easily available to us and to nobody else<\/span>. This should go without saying, but sadly, it does not.<\/li>\n<li>be friendly to the do-it-yourselfer, by making it <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">easy to install and connect to anything else<\/span> I might want to connect it to. Not just products of vendors who have business deal with one of the big platform vendors, and they aren&#8217;t currently suing each other. And of course:<\/li>\n<li>can be <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">supported in the long term<\/span>. Do we really think that any of those tech giants are going to support their IoT products for the life of my house? If not, why would I attach such a gadget to my house?<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I call this better, customer and user centric form of the Internet of Things the <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong>&#8220;Indie IoT&#8221;<\/strong><\/span>. &#8220;Indie&#8221; as in independent, grass-roots, not beholden to some overlord.<\/p>\n<p>Personally, I will never buy &#8220;Overlord IoT products&#8221;. Their downsides are much bigger than their advantages, in my opinion and the opinion of many people I have talked to.<\/p>\n<p>But I would buy &#8220;Indie IoT&#8221; products, and I have: for example, I have the excellent <a href=\"https:\/\/iotawatt.com\/\">IotaWatt<\/a> Energy Monitor in my garage. It monitors my house&#8217;s energy consumption, it&#8217;s entirely open source hardware and open source software, and has no backdoors. All the data is easily available to me, and to nobody else (well, unless I explicitly send it somewhere else). And guess what: I can hack it like anything else I buy at the hardware store for my house.<\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t think the IotaWatt describes itself as an Indie IoT product, but it meets my definition. I would buy other because the IoT could be fun, and useful besides! And I would <a href=\"\/blog\/2012\/12\/my-raspberry-pi-pool-timer-why\/\">build<\/a> <a href=\"\/blog\/2016\/05\/two-standing-desks-programmable-lights-bamboo-floor-and-a-raspberry-pi-my-remodeled-home-office\/\">more<\/a> to solve problems that I have in my house, if it was a bit easier to connect them to each other. So I think perhaps <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">it&#8217;s time to try and connect some of the developers of Indie IoT products together<\/span>, and come up with some more integrated solutions rather than point projects\/products.<\/p>\n<p>It should not be too hard to come up with some basic agreements that allow for more interesting use cases to be supported. For example, my Raspberry Pi-controlled ceiling fan, as well as my pool timer, could use some buttons or switches to control them in addition to what I can do over the web. There must be somebody out there who likes to build &#8220;Indie IoT buttons&#8221;, and we should be able to agree on some simple protocols (e.g. via the <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Web_of_Things\">Web of Things<\/a>) so we can connect, without either of us having to reinvent the wheel or go through somebody else&#8217;s cloud. Or a display that I can mount in the hallway that gives me status information. Or some motion sensor that causes the pool pumps to turn of when somebody is in the back yard. Or &#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Anybody up for that kind of thing? <a href=\"\/blog\/contact\/\">Reach out<\/a>, or better, blog your thoughts and ping this blog.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Famous sci-fi author Bruce Sterling said it well in his non-fiction essay The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things: The internet of things &#8230; is neither about internet nor things,\u2028 but a battle \u2026 for the control of property. Too dramatic for you? Well, it&#8217;s prime holiday shopping season, and so I went browsing&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"webmentions_disabled":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[332],"tags":[572,573],"class_list":["post-4247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-iot","tag-indie-iot","tag-web-of-things","kind-article"],"kind":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4247"}],"version-history":[{"count":19,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4266,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4247\/revisions\/4266"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/upon2020.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}