In 1865, International Telecommunication Union[1] (ITU) was formed at the International Telegraph Convention to coordinate the shared use of the radio spectrum. Now ITU is the United Nations specialized agency in the field of telecommunications, information and communication technologies (ICTs). The ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) is a permanent organ of ITU.
Expertizes from all around the globe was involved in the standardization requirements to the Internet of Things technologies. Every concern raised by the commenters will be discussed while the common concern will be the privacy and the risk for all things to be connected to the Internet.
What’s Internet of Things? According to the recommendation Y.2060 Overview of the Internet of things raised by ITU-T at June, 2012[2], the Internet of things is a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies.
In 10 June, 2015, ITU-T established a new study group SG20 to address the standardization requirements of Internet of Things technologies.
Hence, things that can be interconnected to the Internet is called the Internet of things. These things can be phone, watch, light bulbs, TV, refrigerator, car, traffic light, and even rubbish bins, etc. The implication for the things to be connected to the Internet is that we are exchanging information instantly and around the globe.
For example, you can watch the latest episode around the globe with the smart TV instantly. Hence, the message of the episode is delivering to the globe instead of selected countries. The economic value is multiplied in exponential.
Another example is order can be made via the Internet when you notice your refrigerator is empty. The supermarket will deliver your order to your home upon receiving your order. The manufacturer will then manufacture the products upon receiving orders from supermarkets. With the streamline from your order to the manufacturer, the number of stocks in the warehouse is then minimized. The food that is expired in the warehouse is then greatly reduced.
A more future example is the cars could be communicated itself with the help of the machine to machine communication. When 2 smart cars were crashing each other accidentally, the smart cars could be communicated itself and stopped the incident without the human interaction. Together with the help of the smart traffic light, when the smart traffic light was notified about the incident by receiving the crashing report from the crashing smart cars, it could then trigger a preventive action plan such as changing the traffic light to prevent further crashing and communicate with the other on the path’s smart cars.
Common Concern of IoT
The privacy issue and the risk of being interconnected with things can be viewed as eco-system in the information society while this eco system is still under development.
For example, we can all beneficial from the smart car and the smart transport system to reduce the accident rate. However, what if someone hacks into the smart transport system, and triggers an accident targeting a person?
With this example, I’ll view in this way, A triggered an accident to B. A was committing crime and this crime is the same as you are driving a car and crashing to B. Hence, the story goes with A is going to be charged of murder with evidence. However, in real accidents in many countries A cannot be traced and hence A is not charged.
As a result, IoT suggests things needs to be identified in the information society. With the identity, smart car A and B has identity in the information society. When there’s accident, the smart traffic light will record the incident with smart car A and B. And the regulatory will investigate case by case.
Ideally, if A has ethnics that A understand the consequence of committing crime, such as it leaves bad record that would affect A’s whole life, and hence A rejected to commit crime at first place. Then all the identity in the information society became a preventive measure since all activities in the information society is traceable, even if you try to read a record, it will be logged.
From ancient time, human introduce ethnics to regulate the interaction between humans. For example, most of the ancient people didn’t know the reason why the son cannot marry with his mum. But ethnics told most of the ancient people this was not acceptable and hence this was forbidden. As a result, the human being can remain at the top of the food chain.
Hence, can we develop Internet ethnics in this era? With the education, most of the people nowadays know the reason behind the ethnics and has its decision to follow the ethnics or not. However, not every introduced ethnics is sensible. Some of them may be introduced for the sake of the rulers. Thus, a little group of the people would wonder the ethnics and even challenge with the rulers. How to solve these challenge will be the rulers’ top priority nowadays.
So as to evaluating every ethnics, education is a must and the Internet is the platform for storing our treasury – our knowledge and for discussing the ethnics introduced by the rulers. Only sensible ethnics can then be remained in the flow of the time. Hence, the Internet that is open and public is the foundation for our ongoing evolution.
According to the ICT figure released by ITU at 26 May, 2015[3], 3.2 billion people are using the Internet globally. Internet penetration is 43% of the global population, of which the internet penetration in the developed countries is 82.2%, 35.3% in the developing countries and 9.5% in the least developed countries (LDCs).
Hence, half of the people in the world access to the Internet. With the Internet, you can have free university education[4] and a connection to the globe platform. According to the figure of the internet penetration, you can summarize as a result of the imbalance of the resource allocation. 9.5% in the least developed countries of the Internet penetration can mean the people there have so little resource that they cannot afford to access to the Internet. In fact, they can’t even support their life.
This imbalance of the resource allocation can lead to wars in the future especially when there is a shortage of resource. Hence, United Nation was set up 70 years ago to coordinate this kind of resource balancing. Energy is the key for solving the problem. A clean and recycling energy is our future.
For the concern about the risk of being connected with things, I viewed the concern of being connected with things is the concern of unauthorized access to the data.
Every message in the Internet Era has access level. Different people has different access right to the message. For example, you can share a particular message to your Facebook friends only. In more serious case, an email can be restricted to the government internal discussion. However, some messages like news is opened to all.
When someone wants to breach his access right (well, it’s common for people to gather all information that he can grep and it’s a common trick for boss to leak the so called confidential information to these people.) , it’s the same no matter the information is Online or Offline.
The cognition of the message is more important than the spread of message. I noticed that many people has its own idea opposite to the main media. For example, in the press release of the MTR’s stock holder meeting, many people showed up and spoke for their point of view contrasting to the vote result. Does the media represent your point of view?
The importance of education is to develop children’s knowledge and the analytic skill to these knowledge. With the Internet, you will get your support easily. I believe innovation will be grown exponentially in the Internet era. Since the Internet can automate many things, I won’t be surprised if 90% of the global population is researcher in the future and the meaning of living will no longer being satisfied with physical demands such as eating or breathing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Telecommunication_Union
[2] http://www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-Y.2060-201206-I
[3] http://www.itu.int/net/pressoffice/press_releases/2015/17.aspx#.VfY019Kqqko
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