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>IoT vendors are causing a tragedy of the commons, inflicting quite a lot of damage It's an interesting problem in that the value of hackale/wormable IoT devic

by dexen 7y ago

>IoT vendors are causing a tragedy of the commons, inflicting quite a lot of damage It's an interesting problem in that the value of hackale/wormable IoT devices stems from their sheer number. In a way the culpability of any singular vendor for any singular sale is low by and of itself; it's only large in aggregate of all the vendors' products ever sold & still deployed. This is a reverse of, but comparable to, the low value of personal data being gathered&processed (or stolen) - for every singular individual, the value/loss is exceedingly low. The value lies in the aggregate of the data; the whole is much more than the sum of its parts. Thus the prosecution of things like the Equifax hack, or the insecure IoT devices is pretty spotty at best. Perhaps we need a new, specialized legislation & judiciary for cases where network effects dominate.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
There aren't many "network effects" (the business term) in IoT, despite vendors' best efforts. The value of the network to the user does not increase with the number of nodes in the network. That said, I agree there's a sort-of similar pattern here, which I feel underlies many of the biggest problems of our era - including climate change. The pattern is that there's a lot of entities - individual, small and large companies - engaging in transactions, and each transaction has a small negative - some personal data stolen here, some toaster joining the botnet there, some trivial amount of carbon emitted elsewhere. The negatives however add up, and ultimately manifest as huge and international problems. We definitely need to develop legislative methods that would combat this pattern at the structural level, regardless of the business domain it shows itself in.
kbenson 7y ago
That's an interesting perspective. It brings to light some personal responsibility we might be glossing over. Is it the responsibility of the bottled water seller to not sell plastic bottles because they fill landfills, or the consumer to make sure to dispose of the plastic bottle responsibly? That doesn't entirely match the current situation, but there probably is a some responsibility that lays with consumers for buying crappy devices from companies with no track record for keeping them updated. It's not always simple to reason about, but it is something to consider next time there's a decision to buy some cheaper device from some no name company or from some well known company (that hopefully has some sort of support lifetime at least).

by dexen 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago

There aren't many "network effects" (the business term) in IoT, despite vendors' best efforts. The value of the network to the user does not increase with the number of nodes in the network. That said, I agree there's a sort-of similar pattern here, which I feel underlies many of the biggest problems of our era - including climate change. The pattern is that there's a lot of entities - individual, small and large companies - engaging in transactions, and each transaction has a small negative - some personal data stolen here, some toaster joining the botnet there, some trivial amount of carbon emitted elsewhere. The negatives however add up, and ultimately manifest as huge and international problems. We definitely need to develop legislative methods that would combat this pattern at the structural level, regardless of the business domain it shows itself in.

kbenson 7y ago

That's an interesting perspective. It brings to light some personal responsibility we might be glossing over. Is it the responsibility of the bottled water seller to not sell plastic bottles because they fill landfills, or the consumer to make sure to dispose of the plastic bottle responsibly? That doesn't entirely match the current situation, but there probably is a some responsibility that lays with consumers for buying crappy devices from companies with no track record for keeping them updated. It's not always simple to reason about, but it is something to consider next time there's a decision to buy some cheaper device from some no name company or from some well known company (that hopefully has some sort of support lifetime at least).