The thing that I'm not super clear on is how IoT will benefit many of us when the data will likely be owned and kept close to the various companies that are har

The thing that I'm not super clear on is how IoT will benefit many of us when the data will likely be owned and kept close to the various companies that are harvesting all of it. I see why it would be advantageous of a smart Mr. Coffee sending data off to its servers so they can collect usage data, then they can improve their product and marketing. But the real breakthroughs would be in sharing this data openly. Maybe people can make connections between coffee consumption and say...obesity, car accidents, productivity, family spending habits, etc, etc, etc. Like we might be able to put massive data to a lot of the experiments we hear about all the time that use a tiny case study of maybe 20 students at some university. And not only that but people could begin to act on the data and develop new products, solutions and services to our benefit and continue to get more data about them in real time. That's the advantage I see to IoT, but I don't see it doing much for us in its current stage as companies have no real incentive to share all that data. Maybe some sort of open IoT is what we need to get things moving the right direction. But then we all know security is still a major pitfall of IoT to begin with.