IoT news of the week for March 13, 2020

Microsoft discovers utilities are big on IoT: Once again, Microsoft has interviewed executives in a specific industry to understand how that industry views IoT. This time, the software giant interviewed 100 executives in the utility sector to determine how much they use IoT (a lot; 85% of the companies they represent are adopting IoT) and what their issues are. In the energy and utility industry, the biggest challenges to adoption are people-related; 47% have trouble finding workers and 44% lack the resources to train workers. Since IoT success is heavily dependent on people, this is a sobering stat for the energy industry. (Microsoft)

Whoop! I hate this idea: Whoop, the maker of a fitness band that measures activity and heart rate so it can convert them to insights that tell wearers when to rest and recover, is using data from employees’ bands to incentivize those employees to take better care of themselves. In a blog post from Whoop’s founder and CEO, he says that employees whose data ends up in the “red zone,” which means they need to rest, are allowed to work from home. And employees who get a set amount of quality sleep each month are entitled to a $100 bonus. I hate this story, as it’s the realization of some of my worst fears about the IoT surveillance state. I get that Whoop makes this product and it is trying to provide rewards, but any company using highly personal employee data to influence behavior, for any reason, feels like a dangerous precedent to set. (Whoop)

And here’s a story about using Fitbit data to track COVID-19: Researchers at The Lancet have apparently determined that using Fitbit data to track the spread of illness is feasible, so the writer of this article dives into all the questions they had about Fitbit’s data-sharing practices (they may surprise you) and whether or not we want our devices to share our data for public health research. It’s a good read, especially if that Whoop story scares you. (PJ Media)

The do-it-for-me smart home and security business is booming: This story takes a look at the newly public Vivint, one of the big players in the home security market and an installer of smart home equipment. The company is averaging higher equipment sales than last year and installs an average of 15 devices in each home. It also sees users interacting with the system 13 times a day. Perhaps a more fascinating stat for anyone dealing with monitored devices is that the net cost to monitor a customer is $13.51 per month, down from a peak of $17.04 per month per subscriber 21 months ago. I’d like to know how it got those costs down. (CE Pro)

Silicon Labs buys low-power wireless assets from Redpine: Wireless chip company Silicon Labs has signed a $308 million cash deal to buy Wi-Fi and Bluetooth assets; a development center in Hyderabad, India; and a number of patents from Redpine Signals. The acquisition will also add $20 million to Silicon Labs’ revenue on an annualized basis. (Silicon Labs)

Another day, another IoT survey: Late last year The Eclipse Foundation got 366 people (mostly developers) to respond to their survey on the commercialization of the IoT, and found that just under 40% are actually deploying IoT solutions while 30% of companies are planning to spend less than $100,000 on IoT. The biggest surprise for me was that, among those surveyed, Amazon’s AWS was the top cloud they planned to use for their IoT deployments (37%) followed by Microsoft Azure (31%) and Google’s Compute Platform (27%).  (The Eclipse Foundation)

Think the IoT can’t be co-opted for mass surveillance? Think again: This NBC investigation about a man named Zachary McCoy, who happened to have biked passed a house several times as it was being robbed, is a nightmare. Local police used a geofence warrant to grab data about devices that passed by the home at the time of the crime to try to find a suspect. McCoy’s Android phone was caught in the geofence, so police asked Google to identify him. Google let McCoy know that police were seeking his identity, but not why, and that he had a week to respond in order to prevent police from getting his identity. McCoy had to hire a lawyer to figure out what was going on and the lawyer had to file to protect McCoy’s identity from the police. This is terrifying for several reasons. One, geofence warrants are an easy way for police to get a lot of suspects and bring them in. And once someone is targeted in an investigation or inside a police station, they can find their lives upended even if they’re innocent. Two, the emails Google sent to McCoy contained little information for him to go on, which made it tough to find out how much trouble he might be in. And three, he had to spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer to deal with all of it. I would like firms such as Google to protect their users by pushing back vigorously against the laws that enable these warrants, and by providing more information to citizens caught up in these nets. (NBC News)

I can’t wait to see the details of this EU right-to-repair plan: The European Union has proposed some type of regulation that would require companies to both make electronic devices repairable and to support their software in order to extend the life of those devices while also reducing waste. This is a great idea. But while I’m generally in favor of easy access to electronics so I can swap out failed drives or faulty batteries myself, I am curious how they could mandate such a thing for connected devices, especially if the company providing the device can no longer support it economically. Some electronics die because the company behind them, big or small, doesn’t want to pay to support a product that didn’t do well in the market. A right to repair doesn’t equate to a promise that something will still work. (TechCrunch)

The end of Windows 7 creates more urgency around healthcare security: I have written about the challenges hospitals face when it comes to their connected medical equipment, and this story drives home the risks. Based on a study by Palo Alto Networks, it focuses on the number of machines in hospitals that run outdated and unsupported operating systems. The issue is simply that computer OSes aren’t designed to last as long as imaging machines or other high-end equipment. It’s one of the biggest challenges associated with the internet of things, whether we’re talking about hospitals, cars, or factory equipment. While companies can mitigate this risk somewhat by keeping their out-of-date connected gear off the internet, it’s a stopgap. Meanwhile, companies such as Esper, Foundries, and others are trying to solve the challenge of out-of-date OSes by creating services that manage OSes on machines as a service, keeping them up to date for as long as the underlying hardware can handle it. (Wired)

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