Internet of Things news of the week

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Alexa goes to Vegas: The Wynn hotel in Las Vegas is putting an amazon Echo in more than 4,000 hotel rooms. These Echoes will control lights, shades and even TVs in the rooms, offering folks a way to test out new smart home amenities without having to log into a room system with their phones in order to control things. It may also win more converts to the Amazon Echo when visitors get a taste of the future they can have today. (Venture Beat)

More Alexa: Also, Alexa is now connected to If This Then That for folks in the UK. Beware of latency. (Wired)

How do you bring back jobs when automation is clearly coming? Donald Trump campaigned on the idea that he would bring back various manufacturing and certain energy jobs to the US. But as anyone who covers the industrial internet can see, automation and reducing human input is the path forward for most manufacturers. So while Trump saved a Carrier plant in Indiana, there is much hubbub over how a number of the jobs will be automated out of existence as part of Carrier’s investment in that plant.  This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has seen the efficiencies wrought by implementing sensors and automation in factory settings. I found this article helpful in showing exactly what is happening as manufacturers search for efficiency and expect it to get worse for workers who want to work on a line as IoT becomes more fully adopted. Then the question becomes, where do you look after the basics are automated? (Brookings)

Wi-Fi’s secret power: The London Tube is joining other agencies in trying to use WiFi on people’s phones to understand where humans are clustering and where they go. The Tube is hoping to get information about how people use the transportation system as it tries to plan upgrades and understand usage patterns. This is one of those aspects of Wi-Fi that people don’t talk about, but it’s well known in the marketing world. A phone typically scans for Wi-Fi networks whenever its WiFi is turned on, and it also shares data about the previous networks it has connected to. By parsing this data a company can create individual profiles of people since most phones are going to look for a unique cluster of familiar networks. These individual profiles may not be associated with a specific person (although they could be) but they can be used to track folks on a Tube platform, or in the case of the Austin airport, the time it takes a particular phone to get through a TSA line. I have been stoked about sensors that measure density and people for a while, although I’m a fan of more anonymous options. However, using WiFi does offer a way for entities to get useful data without deploying specialized sensors. Unless, of course, more people turn their wi-Fi off when they leave their home. (Wired)

What’s the government doing about IoT? If you really want to know, here’s a report that purports to share exactly that. It seems pretty short. (Center for Data Innovation)

How do we have a conversation about privacy?   If you guys are like me, you’ve been inundated with emails or notifications in your favorite apps and services noting that their privacy policies have changed. I read through most of them because as a journalist, it’s my job, but every time I get one I’m tempted to shrug it off. And frankly, that’s what companies are counting on. Because even though Uber’s decision to track where you are heading for five minutes after a trip is complete feels like an overreach, they have a semi-legit sounding reason, and most people aren’t going to stop using the app. Yet, when faced with the uptick in privacy stories and downloads of the Signal app it seems like people still value some aspects of their privacy. How can we have a productive and real conversation about this, especially when the government isn’t likely to take any positive role in the near term when it comes to protecting personal privacy? This is a serious topic that isn’t getting the attention it deserves. How can we make sure it does? (CNET)

How will IoT affect the environment? If you believe that everything will get connected to the internet, we’re talking about a huge number of silicon chips getting attached to mundane objects. and While those devices may not consume a lot of extra electricity, the act of tossing at the end of their lifetime puts toxic metals into landfills. Plus, all the data they capture has to be stored somewhere, leading to more data centers getting built. This all feels like a negative for folks trying to be green, but there’s also a huge opportunity to create more responsive electrical systems and conserve energy by making our utilities and buildings smarter. Will it balance out? (The Guardian)

Look, it’s an IoT Bill of Rights: If you scroll down to this article on Limor Friend, the founder of Adafruit, you’ll see her idea of an IoT Bill of Rights that seems like a nice start for building a collaborative internet of things. It focuses most on what happens to the data collected by things, such as users own their own data and companies collecting public data must keep that data public. I’d love to see an industry-wide conversation about this. (Microsoft blog)