Article: Stanford engineers aim to connect the world with ant-sized radios

Technologies such as this small radio are going to be crucial to the Internet of Things. This new radio technology is particularly promising due to its low cost and absurdly low power consumption. Even if dozens are needed to be seeded throughout a home or a few on any individual appliance it’ll still be cost effective enough to implement.

However, the ability to connect many, if not most, of our belongings presents both exciting opportunities and disconcerting challenges. The ability to quantify and track our daily activities will surely bring some benefit in many fields. Some applications off the top of my head range from the serious, such as biometrics and the ability to detect an impending heart attack, to the convenient, like refrigerators that can warn you when you are about to run out of your favorite yogurt. I would hope that the opportunity to be more conscientious about our choices and their effect on us will make it easier to make the right choices for us in the long-run.

The most alarming threat that these potentially ubiquitous radios pose is that third-parties can keep track of all of our activities and movements without our consent. I’m not so much worried about the Googles and Facebooks of the world; we opt to give them as much or as little of our information as we desire. (How useful those websites are if we give them the bare minimum of our information and the current social expectation to divulge as much as we can are another matter.) No, what concerns me are intrusive government agencies, domestic or foreign, that seek to indiscriminately capture as much information as possible.

The more points of access that any system has the more vulnerabilities it will have, which make it easier for aforementioned agencies to penetrate any defenses the Internet of Things will have. Further compromising security will be the fact that this Internet of Things will necessarily have to accommodate a wide range of manufacturers and software developers. It is highly unlikely that Apple or Google alone will dominate this ecosystem, and even if either does they will have to make their ecosystems hospitable to third-party manufacturers and developers. For example, a house with the Apple iHome OS ecosystem will certainly have to accept both refrigerators with an Apple appliance chip or with their own manufacturer’s custom programming.

Will the benefits of an Internet of Things outweigh the risks? I suspect that those companies that stand to benefit the most from the Internet of Things will invest considerable resources into strengthening their security taskforce to make sure that the Internet of Things is still an attractive prospect for most of us.