IOT – i The Internet of Things Initiative

"Even in research we must look into what we leave behind", Gérald Santucci Project acronym: IoT-I Project full title: The Internet of Things Initiative Grant agreement no.: 257565 Doc. Ref.: IOT-I_DEL_D2.5_vFINAL_(01122012) Responsible: van Kranenburg, R. J. List of contributors Denis Jaromil Roio Reviewer Carrez, F. Date of issue: 30th November 2012 Status: Final Security: Public

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Table of Contents

1. Introduction 2. What are talking about? with contributions from Sean Dodson, David Stephenson and Denis Jaromil Roio 3. The four main issues. 3.1. Awareness, Marc Langheinrich 3.2. Invisibility, Cécile Crutzen 3.3. Inevitability, Alicia Benessia 3.4. Implementation, Katharina Liebrand 4. The four main solutions. 4.1. Educating people into the mundane: a collaborative exercise 4.2. Design & Feedback 4.3 Corporate Social Responsibility, New Business & New Decision making models 4.4 Co-creation 5. IoT Label, ethicsinside.eu 6. Conclusion

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1. Introduction

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All things tend to disappear, and especially things man made. 'Ephemeralisation' was Buckminster Fuller’s term for describing the way that a technology becomes subsumed in the society that uses it3. The pencil, the gramophone, the telephone, the CD player, technology that was around when we grew up, is not technology to us, it is simply another layer of connectivity. Ephemeralisation is the process where technologies are being turned into functional literacies; on the level of their gram-mar, however, there is very little coordination in their disappearing acts. These tech-nologies disappear as technology because we cannot see them as something we have to master, to learn, to study. They seem to be a given. Their interface is so intuitive, so tailored to specific tasks, that they seem natural.

A publication on ethics might seem a strange to some in a policy context, claiming that 'Governance' as a term would cover the issues. The first and second wave of EU research into building some kind of 'total connectivity' (the research programs I3, Disappearing Computer and Convivio) showed that philosophical questions about what it means to be 'human' in Ambient Intelligence, ubicomp or Internet of Things are fundamental and need to be addressed by the highest political echelons in pre-cisely this way as IoT is setting forth a new ontology, a new relationship between men and the environment, that cannot be addressed solely in the issues of privacy, security, safety, nor can it be addressed with in legal framework that does not en-gage in the new agencies and relationships that are generated by IoT. As such we find ourselves in a transition period where our old legal, policy and economic tools are stretched beyond their productive capacities and new ones can not yet be vali-dated or tested as the new terrain is not yet clearly visible. In times like that it is the task of any elite (and the IoT community is an elite) to discuss as openly and as honestly as possible what the consequences are of technological and social devel-opments it has funded, fostered and facilitated are.

It is therefore that the term 'ethics' is sound as it is a place and discourse and which the new forms of power and political systems beyond our current notion of democra-cy will be thought and formed.

In i3magazine 20031, Jakub Wejchert of Future and Emerging Technologies Unit, European Commission, project officer of i3 and Disappearing Computer Research Initiatives, said:

"What needs to be explored is how to support the human cognition of the physical, of embodied knowledge and, in more general terms, how to support knowledge of 'how' rather than 'what'. It is in this direction that some work on tangible media and ubiquitous computing has started to look, and it is this direction that some of the work in i3 and the disappearing computer have started to explore. Up until recently, information technology was developed (either consciously or subconsciously) under a number of context-free metaphors (such as the 'wise machine', the 'text book' or the notion of 'reproducing reality') and has used a range of techniques to further the-se aims. For the human being, most of these have led to the support of conceptual 1 “Nothing is experienced by itself, but always in relation to its surrounding, the sequences of events leading up to it, the

memory of past experiences…” Kevin Lynch, Image of the City In this series of articles featured exclusively in i3magazine, Jakub Wejchert takes readers on a series of “journeys” that explore the design of interactive systems. In the first of these articles he focused on method and process; in the current one, he gets “down-to-earth” and explores the contexts of location and place. As before, Jakub refers to examples of i3 work (as well as some of the more recent work under the “disappearing computer” research programme), as landmarks on the journey. Editor, Mimo Caenepeel ISSN: 1397-906X © i3magazine 2003, Jakub.Wejchert@cec.eu.int

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abstraction or a form of reproduced reality. However, as we start to look at the real world (rather than the world of the machine) for inspiration, we must consider real objects, real people and real places.”

Thus, as we start moving towards environments in which computing becomes less explicit and more embedded into the fabric of everyday places and activities, the role and nature of everyday objects, locations and places will all come to the fore. It is in this realm that architectural, anthropological, psychological and skill-based con-cepts are likely to play a major role. In the long term, as we move towards a 'knowledge-based society', we have to ask: "Have we been supporting only one kind of knowledge up to now"? and "How can we best support different kinds of knowledge"? To do this we need to support a diversity of things we understand by 'knowledge' – ranging from the cognitively abstract, through to knowledge that is 'at hand' and embodied in our physical everyday world, to sequences of past events, and our memories of past experiences… This will involve rethinking what we mean by 'knowledge representation', constructing new forms of 'flows' between content and context, and exploring the balance between the 'global' and the 'local'. Perhaps in the future we will look back to our preindustrial roots as inspiration – back to a reverence for 'place', 'location' and the importance of the 'being within the world' and the 'here and now'… Perhaps in the future, we will live in a world that is more 'alive' and more 'deeply interconnected' than we can currently imagine?"

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The Internet of Things and Services

His words seem now to be echoed by voices in the EU industry of today. In The In-ternet of Things & Services: Renaissance Re-Born, Hans-Jürgen Kugler of Kugler Maag Cie GmbH,2 and Stefan Ferber of Bosch Software Innovations GmbH3, claim:

"The Internet of Things & Services is a major driver for technological development and will dramatically change products, services, and markets. It not only empowers people to collaborate, but any product or service developed by people – or those emerging from such collaboration. The technology will definitely change business, but the social implications will change our society beyond our wildest dreams. We are in the transition to a new society: We are in the 2nd Renaissance."

They continue:

"Trust, empathy, and transcendence are the drivers for inner community relation-ships which may even take symbiotic forms.... Transparency and transcendence of purpose will be the foundation, not secretive privacy and selfishness. Openness is the basis for trust, which in turn is the precondition for building a society that re-spects individuals in their diversity, while emphasizing the 'entangledness' of all our lives. This connectedness will help to remind us that Earth is currently the only eco-system accessible to us, defined by “planetary boundaries” providing “safe operating space for humanity."

EU policy context

We are in interesting times, as the phrase goes for Internet of Things. In Europe Commissioner Kroes is not listing it as a term anymore on the topics of interest. The one-stop for Europe Internet of Things unit of Gérald Santucci that was extremely productive in aligning and capturing foreign interest and expertise, is dispersed - recently (Spring 2012) – within DG CONNECT over three to four different units that need to find common ground from very different perspectives that are quite una-ligned (for example security vs. innovation). Currently there is no overall vision. It seems that this turn towards a ‘horizontal operation’ was based on the assumption that the term ‘Internet of Things’ would not break through globally. In itself this idea is quite strange of it was Europe that put the term on the map. However, there is no indication that China will drop the term over the Sensing Planet and the USA we see a thorough rise both in industry and in policy circles of ‘Internet of Things’. As we have seen this before, the EU giving up a strong policy lead by abandoning certain terms that were build on strong research programmes – for example ‘Disappearing Computer’ and ‘Ambient Intelligence’ – this can lead to destroying valuable intellec-tual capital as well hinder significantly the potential influence of the current IoT flag-ships and EU industry as a whole. Although any term has its advantages and drawbacks it is precisely the fuzzy nature of the term that foregrounds it disruptive potential. Trying to break it down too early in ‘manageable’ formats and labels hides this disruptive potential only superficially. The paradigm shift will not go away be-cause it is labelled ‘transition’ or futures’. Such wishful thinking and failure to con-front the ontological shift entailed by a society going ‘hybrid’ means that instead of negotiating a balance between digital, virtual and real, this will be forced upon you, 2 Email: hansjuergen.kugler@kuglermaag.com 3 Email: stefan.ferber@bosch-si.com

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not as a negotiated balance, but as a given. Fortunately history seems to draw its own balances. At this moment in time top down planning is only one major influence. Bottom up initiatives such as the DIY Arduino movement, the focus on open and inclusive by collaborative think tanks such as Council that can set up high level poli-cy meetings in Wuxi and NY, and the impact of entrepreneurial start-ups like Pachu-be (now Cosm), Libelium and Raspberry Pi, are as influential, if not more, in driving the developments. However, the output and work on the individual projects in the IERC Cluster are growing in importance in keeping the term in the forefront of the debate. One of the outputs of one of these projects, IoT-I, is aimed at doing that through highlighting the fundamental changes that IoT is bringing in the relationships between humans and things, and humans and the environment.

What do we want to?

We want to engage citizens on the one hand and developers on the other in a broad public debate on the transition that IoT will bring to all sectors of society and every-day relations between people, objects and their environment. In order to engage meaningfully this task aims to create consensus among IoT experts - technical, ser-vice oriented, policy and innovation (start-ups) - about the main questions and is-sues that Ethics and IoT entail. The report will make recommendations in cooperation with IoT Forum, Council, IERC and other organisations to present some kind of EU IoT label, much like an eco label, saying these products, apps, services are privacy friendly, energy neutral, have open standards. The checkbox that is ac-companying the label could show start-ups how far they are in attaining such a label.

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Method

A series of interviews, desk research and workshops informed this task in IoT-I on Ethics.

• Workshop 1 in Delft, April 2nd 20124 was co-organized with Jeroen van den Hoven and his team as part of the subgroup Ethics of the Expert Group on IoT for the European Commission.

• Workshop 25 in Venice6, IoT-I: Open Session7 on Ethics in IoT8 looked at ethics as a real building block and potential 'usp' that will make actual every-day practices, services and implementation also really better. The workshop consists of two main sections and a recap and conclusion by Gérald Santucci (head of Unit Knowledge Sharing).

• The 3d workshop during the 4th Annual Internet of Things Europe 2012 12th – 13th November, Brussels, with the participation of Maurizio Salvi, political advisor of Barroso.

• The 4th workshop in November 19th -23rd in Brussels at Transmediale, Mas-ter in New Media, together with Natacha Roussel.

• The 5th and final workshop in Bled, as part of the Working Group Societal of the IoT Forum, November 28th 2012.

In the research, interviews, workshops and literature we were able to draw up a ma-trix of main issues and main solutions that accompany the transition towards a fully connected ‘always on’ world that exists not as a work-related world, but as the ‘nor-mal’, and utterly mundane everyday world that informs our daily practices, relations and aspirations. Each issue is explained in the words of a key expert. Each solution 4 Present: Florent Frederix, Angela Pereira, Paula Curvelo, Rob van Kranenburg, Erwin Kooi, Engin Bozdag, Martijn

Warnier, Christian Detweiler, Francien Deschenne, Layla Alabdulkaim, Zofia Lukszo, Ernst ten Heuvelhof, Walter Pieters, Job Timmermans & Jeroen van den Hoven (organizers)

5 Further Dissemination: IoT Week, 20.6.2012 09:00 -12:00: Angela Pereira will give a short report about the second IoTi Workshop in an IoT Enabler workshop that will kick-off event the AC13 (Enabling Technology) activity chain in the IERC cluster. There are 6Presentations planned: - IERC Cluster: General Roadmap Presentation (Presenter. Ovidiu Vermesan) - Enabling Technologies in the BUTLER project (Prof. Giuseppe Abreu, BUTLER) - Security and Privacy as enabling technology of the future IoT (Trevor Peirce, CASAGRAS2) - Interoperability in IoT (Philippe Cousin, Prob-IT) - Cognitive techniques in IoT (Abdur Rahim, iCORE) - Ethical Issues in the future Internet of things (Rob van Kranenburg) The IERC activity chain on enabling technology (AC13) has the task of developing a roadmap of the required technologies to make IoT a reality. This session will give an initial overview over the intended topics and area of interest to be covered in the ac-tivity chain. It should not give a closed list of technologies and topics but rather initiate an open discussion towards the development of a roadmap.

6 Open Session on Ethics in IoT coordinator Rob van Kranenburg, IoT- Week, Monday, June 18, Venice 1600-1900 http://www.iot-week.eu/

7 Present: Job Timmermans, Angela Perreira, Jeroen van den Hoven, Katharina Liebrand, Franck Le Gall, Robert Mos-kowitz, Rolf Weber, Paul Chartier, Hiroyuki Maromichi, Friedbert Berens, Joachim Trescher, Massimiliano D'Angelo, May-lin Fidler, Francois Carrez, Gérald Santucci, Irene Lopez de Vallejo, angela.pereira@jrc.ec.europa.eu, m.j.vandenhoven@tudelft.nl, j.f.c.timmermans@tudelft.nl, katharina.liebrand@swisscom.com, f.le-gall@inno-group.com, robert.moskowitz@verizon.com, rolf.weber@rwi.uzh.ch, paul.chartier@praxconsultants.co.uk, maromichi_hiroyuki@alab.ntt.co.jp, friedbert.berens@me.com, joachim.treschler@uxp.com, massimili-ano.dangelo@ales.eu.com, mfidler@stanford.edu, f.carrez@surrey.ac.uk, gerald.santucci@ec.europa.eu, ivalle-jo@tekniker.es, abenessia@yahoo.it, trevor.j.peirce@hotmail.com, Paula.Curvelo@jrc.ec.europa.eu,

8 This is the second in a series of workshops that will inform the task of RVK in IoT-i on Ethics, devising and designing an IoT Forum approved label for devices, applications and services that inspires trust of a general audience in ethical design. For a short report of the first, the Delft workshop at April 2nd organized by Jeroen van den Hoven and his team as part of the subgroup Ethics of the Expert Group on IoT for the European Commission. The third will be during IoT Forum No-vember in Bled. The final workshop will be during The 4th Annual Internet of Things Europe 2012 12th – 13th November (part of “EU Internet Week”), Management Centre Europe, Brussels.

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is taking from actual research, best practice and on-going projects. Claudiu Dunga with his team in Romania has made visual triggers, images on the basis of short scenarios that are informed by the issues. These are meant to draw a broad audi-ence of both citizens and developers to a dedicated site: www.ethicsinside.eu. On this site developers can see how far they are to incorporating the solutions into the beginnings of their ideas and product and service development. An ideal scenario is sketched. This ideal scenario is awarded with the ethics inside label. The label de-picts the interrelation between humans, animals, nature, small and large devices and the environment. Equally connected, ideally they should have an equal say.

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2. What are we talking about?

Introduction by Sean Dodsoni:

In 2010 cinema audience across the world were introduced to the gruesome story of Aron Ralston, the man who survived being trapped down a canyon in the Utah de-sert with his right hand crushed beneath a boulder. The film, shot by the British di-rector Danny Boyle, told the story of how, for the next 129 hours, Franco was driven to such a state of despair that he found the strength to cut off his own arm.

Ralston was trapped, miles from home, without a communication device capable of alerting rescuers. But the concept of being lost needs to be rethought by companies seeking to take advantage of the Internet of Things (IoT). Ringtrack is part of a clus-ter of companies based around Cambridge that is developing a range of IoT applica-tions. The firm that has made its name as a leading vehicle tracking and asset recovery specialist, but who are now moving into IoT as their range of tracking de-vices become ever smaller.

Recently, the firm has developed a tiny unit with a remarkable battery capable of powering a range of IoT applications for as long as three to four years. Smaller than a matchbox, the device is a lightweight and features inbuilt motion and temperature sensor. The Ringtrack unit is, moreover, capable of sending and receiving both GPS and the latest LPRG, low power radio frequencies, which can be used on a range of

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local sensor networks. If Aaron Ralston had had one in his back pocket or secreted in his bike helmet, his right arm might still be there.

Ringtrack see a range of applications for its new device away from wilderness res-cue. The company has suggested that the small device could be used in the treat-ment of dementia payments, at least as a safeguard to stop them wandering into harm’s way. Furthermore, the device, which features a real-time clock, a full 3-axis accelerometer, as well as temperatures sensors and various types of on board memory, could also be placed on farm machinery to prevent it being stolen, and ul-timately on luxury goods as theft deterrent.

Powering such devices over long periods of time presents a keen opportunity of the UK electronics industry as a range of tracking applications are developed over the coming years.

Large scale and industrial: M2M

In an OECD report Rudolf van den Berg defines M2M as "those that are actively communicating using wired and wireless networks, are not computers in the tradi-tional sense and are using the Internet in some form or another. He continues to say that M2M devices "are less visible, but more pervasive, than personal communica-tion devices, such as telephones and, therefore, raise issues in relation to privacy. Given the use of M2M for health, transport, consumer electronics, energy use, and virtually every other sector, a very large amount of information can be generated." (OECD, Digital Economy Papers, No 192)

The Technology Strategy Board defines the Internet of Things as “the revolution al-ready under way that is seeing a growing number of internet-enabled devices that can network and communicate with each other and with other web-enabled gadg-ets.” Whereas M2M is mainly the term used in the industry and telecommunication, the broader term that is spearheading this growing convergence of the analogue world with the digital world is ‘Internet of Things’. The UK Technology Strategy Board (UK TSB) is foregrounding this. It has launched a £4m Internet of Things de-monstrator competition that “aims to stimulate the development of an open applica-tion and services ecosystem in the Internet of Things and follows the successful outcome of the preparatory studies earlier this year.” (https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/internet-of-things)

The Internet of Things

The new term to describe this ‘total connectivity’ is Internet of Things. As a citizen you will hardly notice it, as it will be mediated through apps on smart phones, build in regulations in cars and building requirements, policies on e-health and open data programs from local Councils. The world seems more connected every day. With such a gradual process concerns of privacy and security of data, seem to find very little raw ground and real cases to build a protest on or to convince others that there is an issue. The gradualness of the process masks the granularity of the conver-gence of data coming from your body (e-health), your home (smart meter), your car (connected car) and ‘smart’ city services.

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David Stephenson: The Internet of Things from an Industry point of viewii

A brief scenario of life in 2017 shows how the IoT will transform every aspect of our lives. The Internet of Things developed over twenty years, beginning with Mark Weiser’s work on “ubiquitous computing” at XEROX PARC in the early 1990s. The term itself was coined at MIT’s Auto-ID Lab in 1999. Equally important was work at Stanford on micro-miniaturisation of sensors.

A few examples from the current IoT devices will give a better understanding of how it is already transforming our lives:

• The $25 Arduino circuit board from Italy has spawned a global community of hackers and designers who are creating simple IoT devices that could be commercialized;

• The 14,000 plus health and fitness apps for the iPhone help patients take control of their care between doctor visits and promise to reduce health care costs;

• The owner of a Dutch cowherd knows when the cows are pregnant or sick long before symptoms are visible because of tags attached to each cow’s ear;

• IBM’s Smarter Cities program, arguably the largest Iota initiative, is saving cities millions of dollars while making them function more efficiently.

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It will be a threat to companies that insist on hierarchical organisation and top-down management of information. Beyond the benefits to individual companies, the IoT can benefit the economy as a whole, solving some of our most intractable problems. For example, the “smart grid” can help meet the growing need for electricity while simultaneously cutting emissions. HP’s CeNSE project can help protect the rainfor-ests and other precious resources while creating global markets.

There is a technological inevitability to the IoT: it is already a reality and growing rapidly. However, smart companies will not wait until it has fully manifested itself to begin their own trial programs and management reforms to capitalize on this tech-nology that will alter every aspect of our economy and society within the decade.

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IoT and ethics: hacker perspectives9

Author: Jaromil, Date: 15th October 2012

Table of Contents

• 1 Dear Rob,

o We have lost on privacy

o So, what's next?

o The Networked scenario

! Pipe

! Mobile

! Cloud

o Right to Mesh

o Some examples of controversial scenarios

1 Dear Rob,

I write this document as a letter to you, let it be a tribute to the ethnographic tradition of writing, since the style of this contribution can be ascribed to that sort of layers. I believe there should be discourses on ethics and IoT unfolding in inter-personal dia-logs rather than simply provide a series of impersonal statements, observations and measurements.

We are talking about humans here, first of all, and how they are going to integrate their lives within the next layer of machine pervasiveness. Our effort should not be that of speaking the language of machines, rather than contemplate how the lan-guage of humans will appropriate a new IoT grammar.

As you have asked, I've elaborated the narrative I'm going to present here with some (anonymous) hackers with whom I'm familiar: acquaintances and even good friends, mostly employed in the private, corporate, IT sector. But I did not proceed by drafting a questionnaire and asking champions to tick answers on it or write their opinions under pre-fabricated questions. There is some sophistication here of course, as the medium is made of flesh and bones, but again, I believe this is the minimum necessary to introduce a human reflection on matters that concern - more than ever – human networks, much more than machines.

At last, please consider that part of this analysis is influenced by notes taken in a recent meeting I've had with Eben Moglen.

9 This text was written originally for ethicsinside.eu

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1.1 We have lost on privacy

So here we go with the first blow. It makes me suffer I admit. I think we have lost the privacy battle.

The battlefield is blown away. There are and will be reiterated concerns about priva-cy in IoT, but they will be extremely boring and predictable. The fact now is that people have, more or less consciously, given up their privacy for freedom and agili-ty. The deal was done so rapidly that just a few of those signing it have realized what it was going to be. As of today, most people holding a personal information device in their pocket have at least a piece of themselves in the clouds. Let it rain they think, they are happy to have a transparent roof on their head, in the shape of a facebook page. Those of us who weren't using a computer 10 years ago find it very convenient to participate into a new Internet that is so easy to use. Facilitation comes at a price of course and everyone seems to be valuing it less than their own time. Quoting Gavin Starks: "People are more lazy than wary about their personal data". Nevertheless, turning information into money is a risky business and it should concern policy makers.

If we are up to look into this problem the best way to research into it is by making a genealogy, mostly to answer a question: what has been the image of Internet's citi-zenship (of the so called netizen)? What has been of the those few unlistened in-stances of public sector that already back in the '90s were talking about "civic networks"? Is there anyone that tried and/or reached to build a public cybernetic in-frastructure - and not just a cybernetic extension to public infrastructure?

I understand this is not the document were we are up to write now; however this is the time to simplify the discourse on privacy to a simple equation that becomes al-most linear when considering usability and exposure.

We shouldn't play paranoia: we are embracing the present and trying to stay afloat now. This is Europe, our Panopticon. If things were up to go wrong as they did in second world war, we (as in professional scapegoats) would be all dead, not even a hole to hide and write a diary about it. Given the state of things, It just makes no sense to think about it anymore. If a dictator comes up and wants to datamine par-ticular DNA patterns believed to be the seed of all criminality, or particular diets, or keywords in various languages... Hitler 2.0 would be much more efficient nowa-days. But that's not the scenario we want to talk about, really.

Let me Just put on a sardonic smile now, I'll play that good old Pink Floyd song for you: careful with that axe Eugene.

1.2 So, what's next?

So then, what is burning really? Where is the heat?

But of course is the business! the very possibility to do business. And of course we knew it, is the money still, what people crave. Today the real reason why people can even kill is not their privacy. Is the money.

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And the main ethical problem is that the access to the business is not open, like many other things... what liberism promised is not delivered by the progression we have been through in the past 30 years. Something now even non-liberists are ask-ing for (and no, they are not playing a double game, but just asking to respect the numbers...)

IoT provides a great opportunity to unlock new business horizons and we must facili-tate the creation of such jobs outside existing hierarchies: this will be *innovation under austerity*.

This is also the age for a new form of management to arise. Here is a quote of Mi-chael Abrash, a guru for us programmers, successful game developer, now employ-ee of Valve software, one of the biggest companies in this sector, the one behind the Steam engine, talking about the company he is working for on his personal blog:

When he (Gabe Newell) looked into the history of the organization, he found that hierarchical management had been invented for military purposes, where it was per-fectly suited to getting 1,000 men to march over a hill to get shot at. When the Indus-trial Revolution came along, hierarchical management was again a good fit, since the objective was to treat each person as a component, doing exactly the same thing over and over.

In the Internet age, software has close to zero cost of replication and massive net-work effects, so there’s a positive feedback spiral that means that the first mover dominates.

If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and boot-strapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of crea-tive innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones – quite the op-posite, in fact.

Another Pink Floyd song now: We don't need no, top management!

The future is in Agile Development, DevOps, methodologies and professional fig-ures that go naturally along with the way IoT is shaped, power to the grid! We must fight anti innovation costs, not just in terms of money, but of time as well. Beware of those managers that are aggressively defending their first placement by imposing hierarchy on young labour: they are just robbing the future from a new generation of digital natives and, what's worst, they don't even know what to do with that.

1.3 The Networked scenario

Lets talk about the network now. Basically, we can organize the discourse around 3 layers, borrowing terms mostly used in industry:

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- Cloud

- Mobile

- Pipe

1.3.1 Pipe

Pipe is the physical layer of pipes and antennas connecting cities and homes.

Pipe is the domain where well-established providers (sometimes the State) lay down cables. It is logistically unreachable; it’s the snakepit of road developers, under-ground infrastructure, metal cabling industry, big stuff.

It is ethical and important to say that it should be neutral; it is realistic enough to as-sume it will never be completely neutral, hence think of ways monopolistic and uni-lateral behaviour can be contained.

We are small my friend and I think to stay with the people we need to think about small details. The pipe is a dimension that can't offer business for the majority of people, so there will be little to negotiate about it in terms of ethics. What we are left with is just a big question mark on how business can access it for mid and end pro-viders of services (ISPs, TELCOs, service providers). Crucial question, easy to solve on paper but complex to handle in reality...

1.3.2 Mobile

Mobile is the physical layer of mobile objects mostly needed to communicate, send control signals, analyse data. It is a human - machine interface point.

On the mobile the main ethical problem to me, as a developer, is: after buying it, do I really own it? Where is the SDK? In the future we'll see even more young and smart people claiming their right to study, modify, adapt and redistribute: because they are smarter than those who built the stuff in the first place and we should never negate them the right to do it better. And to grow.

There is such a lack of access to education nowadays that closing down even the possibility for self-taught education would be a criminal, if not myopical, act. For many kids study starts from whatever they have in their hand - many are having fun in home brewing operating systems just like a fewer number of us did 10 years ago. Just scroll through the XDA-developers forum to see a 12 year old from Romania, South Italy or Portugal publishing their own modified version of Android that runs better than the one distributed by Vodafone.... and you know what? Google did no evil in this case, as they let the Cyanogenmod independent version of Android ex-ist... what should we expect from public sector?

We need to provide access to the "SDK", the software development kit: mobile de-vices of all kinds (ALL, not just phones) should provide an SDK to all citizens willing to have it. If, like Apple, the SDK is not free, then we must insure that they can at least buy it, that there are student discounts or programs to have it, last but not least that

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a credit card is not required to buy it.

And of course in this regard free software, as in GNU project and FSF ethical guide-lines, is fundamental. That is most of the motivation why we do it since so many years. For the freedom to study.

Free Software is an answer for public policy that enables grassroot access to knowledge. Locking what's in kids pockets is not the thing to do today, really not.

Even security is not an issue here, since security through obscurity is always a fail on the long term and on large scale: make it transparent, tweakable and provide platforms to share concerns and disclose security advisories.

1.3.3 Cloud

As you know, there are big risks in the cloud. Funny enough for certain anarchist types, it is really a matter of sovereign: no exact physical colocation for data.

So the only thing left to do for public sector is, when recruiting, to choose business-es with an ethical set of principles for companies operating in the net.

We must stress the distinction between property of data and ethical treatment of data. We can define data mining practices that respect privacy, down to the tech-nical details. This is possible and we should get busy on it if we aren't already.

Privacy is also important to mention here, but is not the only ethical cornerstone.

Let us shout: *Big data for people, not for companies*!

When we talk about "Open Data" in governance, we must progress so that is not just a central state government apparatus, or a mega-corporation, that bombards us with data and information. Open Data means also participations and actually this is the bigger opportunity in IoT: people's participation.

Many to many. Think of telephones, not televisions!

That's all about the smart grid: not just an omeostatic allocation of energy within a dynamic amount of sources, smart grid also means an horizontal axis for power, hence participation. It can have huge implications in terms of shared governance, property and playing fair with your neighbours.

1.4 Right to Mesh

One last point which reconnects to the *pipe* layer and the grid: mesh networking. A term used in software engineering to indicate the automatic configuration of network routing so that even in absence of a central provider of addresses, single objects can establish a network and act as liaisons between more distant objects.

Networks established this way are much more resilient, at the price of being slightly less performing: they were studied once again for military purposes, to let foot sol-diers communicate through the battlefield even in absence of a long range antenna,

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so that anyone far front could be bridged by anyone behind and still standing, back to the base and to the others.

There are inherent reasons why private sector is often hostile to the practice of mesh networking: their business models are based on centralization as a need, not even an option. A mesh network is more like a civic network, I'd say, where people share the responsibility to keep the communication flow.

It can be extremely useful to have the possibility to establish such networks nowa-days, yet this very possibility is negated at the lowest layers in hardware design, when for instance the circulation of multicast UDP network packets is blocked by ISPs. Even the Linux kernel keeps rather conservative on the issue, requiring root access to be able to send such packets.

Within an IoT scenario the possibility to create mesh networks should be renegotiat-ed at the very least.

1.5 Some examples of controversial scenarios

I'll try to be even briefer here and analyse some cases in which the IoT can turn problematic. The cases below focus on multi-national corporations that are going to make profits in monopolistic configurations, acting as forced intermediaries, on the creativity of people. Something diametrically opposite to what IoT should become.

Facebook: it might happen that ISP and TELCO operators start charging a different price for the access to popular mainstream services like facebook or twitter from smart objects. This scenario could bring some of the centralized wealth home (local ISPs would earn something from the overpopularity of imported services) plus there is a possibility that a company like FB reacts to this by becoming a net-neutrality advocate purely for self-defence purposes. Of course this is just an educated guess about what could be their strategy... but then it would be a win/win situation: we are small in this fight, but if we manage to make a giant charge, we can get far.

Ads: we need to talk frankly about ads. They are the main business model applied to online presence and attention now, Google (the most famous tax evader, after the monarchs) is controlling most of the ads business. We should seriously negotiate some rules there. There should be a deep study, something like a dedicated cabi-net, to understand where we are going, because this seems to be the core business in the next 10 years and there are some dark pitfalls along the way. Ultimately my educated guess here is that ads are not the future, rather than a progressively free release of content which is directly proportional to its age.

Apple: this one is heavy. [Look at this]10. Go Get Started and try to make a "Paid book" account. You need to have a US TAX id. I call this digital colonialism. And we are buying their Trojan horses with public money at extremely expensive prices in Europe: the I-Pads and so. On these platforms the only people who can sell e-books must have a business based in USA. Governments need to look into this and very carefully. In case of the app-store, even to sell an App on their market you need to have a Kvk registration "officially translated in English", which they don't even know 10 [Look at this]: https://itunesconnect.apple.com/WebObjects/iTunesConnect.woa/wa/bookSignup

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what it means. This is about access to markets: looking at the direction where we are going (privatizations...) the least we can do is grant a neutral access to them.

Furthermore DRM, as in digital restriction management, will lead to the enclosure of educational possibilities in having smart objects around, keep an eye on this cam-paign for some good prose on this topic: [Defective by Design]11. We do need to reflect on its use and keep in mind that the most important thing is that kids are able to study when they want. We should never allow any of those bright brains to be fenced into a mental cage; this really would be a crime.

ciao

11 [Defective by Design]: http://www.defectivebydesign.org/

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3. The four main issues

There is a gap between the policy recommendations and Privacy Impact Assess-ment Frameworks and the start-up reality of IoT on the ground with over 17 IoT Plat-forms listed on Postcapes.com and a growing group of attempts to build IoT hardware hubs to provide connectivity in and to the home: apart from Greengoose, and Cosm (formerly Pachube) there is for example the Knut internet-connected sen-sor that keeps you in the know via email: "Our lives a very connected these days. You can check in on friends and family, your car and your home within seconds by typing a few words and pushing a few buttons. Despite this, there are still many pieces that remain cut off from our networks by physical space. The Knut sensor hub aims to connect a few more of those pieces. Much like the Twine device that we saw last fall and the Electric Imp, the Knut is a small sensor-equipped module that enables you to remotely monitor equipment and spaces in your home. The Knut comes equipped with a temperature sensor so that you can monitor the temperature of your wine refrigerator, humidor, basement, etc. It connects to the Internet via Wi-Fi and can send out alerts and information to its owner by way of email and text message."12 We can envisage a lot more of these IoT start-ups. The IoT Ethics 'la-bel' and checkbox should be able to guide them easily and quickly to considering ethics as a USP, not a hindrance to deployment, yet it should also provide at least the possibility for citizens and developers to discuss how “we will live in a world that is more 'alive' and more 'deeply interconnected' than we can currently imagine."

12 http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/chris-weiss-knut-internet-connected-sensor-keeps-you-know-email

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We will track the main issues through interviews with key researchers that have been at the forefront of these issues and have helped to shape the thinking around it. These are:

AWARENESS

INVISIBILITY

INEVITABILITY

IMPLEMENTATION

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3.1 AWARENESS Langheinrich

[5/29/12 5:08:42 PM] Marc Langheinrich: Check out Ivan Székley, What do IT pro-fessionals think about surveillance

[5/29/12 5:09:46 PM] Marc Langheinrich: http://pet-portal.eu/articles/view/27/2010-10-10-Ivan-Szekely-What-Do-IT-Professionals-Think-About-Surveillance.php

[5/29/12 5:21:05 PM] Marc Langheinrich: "The problem is the possibility of technolo-gy taking on a life of its own, so that the actuality and inevitability of technology cre-ates a dictatorship. Not a dictatorship of people over people with the help of technology, but a dictatorship of technology over people." - Ernst Benda (1983), German Federal Constitutional Court, Chief Justice.

The first phase of IoT encompasses the period of 1990 to 2005 and can be traced to the moment Mark Weiser chief scientist at Xerox Parc, publishes “The Computer for the 21st Century” in 1991 (Weiser, 1991) From the 1950s onwards the critical ener-gy was spent on getting computers smaller, building a technological grid to host the-se and creating a psychological and social frame for bringing work to the home and private sphere. Weiser realized that the dashboards for these models – the visuali-sations and experiential situations – were never meant for individuals, but instead for systems and large companies, institutions and think tanks. Weiser is the first the raise the problematic issue of the interface in everyday life and interactions. He be-gan to wonder how best to access this virtual world not only through the keyboard and mouse, but intuitively and using all of the computer’s potentiality.

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The goal of "making the computer disappear” (Weiser, 1991) can happen in different ways and disappearance can take different forms. As described by Streitz (2001) "physical disappearance” refers to the miniaturisation of devices and their integration in other everyday artifacts, as for example, in clothes, so that you don’t see them anymore. Mental disappearance refers to the situation that the artifacts can still be large but they are not perceived as computers because people discern them as, e.g., interactive walls or interactive tables. Thus, technology moves mentally into the background.1 Two core research questions emerge: "how can we design human-information interaction and support human-human communication … by exploiting the affordances of existing artefacts in our environment? And, in doing so, how can we exploit the potential of computer-based, support augmenting these activities?" (Streitz, 200113)

A decade later a Microsoft press notice (Microsoft, 2003) echoed Weiser: "As people find more ways to incorporate these inexpensive, flexible and infinitely customizable devices into their lives, the computers themselves will gradually "disappear" into the fabric of our lives." They are just not yet running on "inductively powered on heat and motion from their environment without batteries."

One of the ways, according to Liam Bannon, director of the Interaction Design Cen-tre, University of Limerick, is to look at the pioneering work of designers Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby and Julian Bleecker. The pair’s impressive body of work has managed to “raise awareness, expose assumptions, provoke action, spark debate, and even entertain” with their notion of critical design. Julian Bleecker who creates “design fictions , artefacts that tell stories new forms of imagining and prototyping" by the blending of science fact, and science fiction.

This is the beginning of rethinking the computing paradigm and the discovery of an individual that claims a different kind of control over the machine; one of individual reciprocity. To paraphrase Mark Weiser, the idea was to take the connectivity out of the computer and put it in the very fabric of our clothes (so we get wearables), in homes (smart homes) and in cities (smart cities). In other words, let us make our-selves into a “dashboard”; the environment will become the interface.

A decade after its conception the Internet of things is an emerging technology yet to reach the consciousness of the masses. And yet it has a surprisingly long, even il-lustrious history2. It is also an integral part of your life. Most of us carry RFID in our wallets without even acknowledging that we are engaging with network technology. But we hold the cards we use to get into the office to the RFID reader embedded in the wall near the door. This reader pushes a constant wave of energy. The antenna in the chip pucks up the energy, then moves it on to the chip that says “hello”. The number appears in a database and in the database one can attach any action to that number: accept as OK and allow to pass. To all extents and purposes the computer is in our pocket and yet it has disappeared from our consciousness, just in the way that Weiser and others predicted. As far back as 1999 MIT brought the cost of the tag down to below 1c (Albrecht, 2002) an important moment to start considering us-ing RFID in a logistical ecology with barcodes and shot codes (2 and 3D barcodes).

13 Streitz, N. A., Kameas, I. Mavrommati (Eds.) (2007), The Disappearing Computer: Interaction Design, System Infrastruc-

tures and Applications for Smart Environments. State-of-the-Art Survey, Springer LNCS 4500.

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EARLY RESEARCH

The Disappearing Computer14 started in 2001. Its mission was "to see how infor-mation technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings, and to see how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people's lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer today." It hosted a wide varie-ty of projects, such as Workspace, aiming "to augment the work environment through spatial computing components, initially for members of the design profes-sions, but with applicability to a wide range of work domains."15, The MiME16 project that focuses on the relationship between computer technology and people's experi-ence of their intimate media collections around the home, and e-Gadgets (e stands for extrovert) seeking "to adapt to the world of tangible objects the notions of com-ponent-based software systems by transforming objects in people's everyday envi-ronment into autonomous artefacts (the eGadgets). The eGadgets range from simple objects (like tags, lights, switches, cups) to complex ones (like PDAs, stere-os) and from small ones (like sensors, pens, keys, books) to large ones (like desks, TVs)."17 The forerunner to DC was i3: Intelligent Information Interfaces18. The Call for i3 in 1996 read:

"The Connected Community calls for investigative research leading to new interfac-es and interaction paradigms aimed at the broad population. As its focus it takes interfaces for the creation and communication of information by people, and for peo-ple and groups in a local community.

Connected Community asks projects to take on a number of themes as a baseline for the research and demonstration of new interfaces, such as:

• Computer Support for Real Life: thinking of ways of augmenting everyday ac-tivity rather than replacing it with a synthetic virtual one;

• Territory as Interface: considering the whole territory of the community as in-terface and thus the relationship between real physical spaces and augment-ed ones;

• Active Participation: making it just as easy for people to create and leave traces (of information) as it is to access that information.

The Connected Community suggests to work on technologies that explore areas related to "Devices", "Information" and "Places", particularly in the context of collec-tive use. For example, public domain devices for collective interfaces, knowledge sedimentation and adaptive databases, bulletin board agents, low-cost portable networked interfaces, wireless devices for collective use, and the linking of territory

14 http://www.disappearing-computer.net/projects.html 15 http://daimi.au.dk/workspace/index.htm 16 http://www.mimeproject.org/ 17 http://www.extrovert-gadgets.net/ 18 "Intelligent Information Interfaces, or i³, is an Esprit Long-Term Research initiative. The aim of i³ (pronounced "eye-

cubed") is to develop new human centred interfaces for interacting with information, aimed at the future broad population. i³ aims at a radical departure from present-day human-machine interface concepts and does this under the assumption that this can only be done guided by a long-term vision intertwining human, societal and technological factors. The initia-tive aims to launch research on new forms of interaction that will place people as active participants rather than passive recipients of information. "http://cordis.europa.eu/esprit/src/eyeintro.htm

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and interface. The schema also sets guidelines for projects on their process and evaluation." 19

The need for non-technical research as the developments got closer to everyday lives of citizens was acknowledged in the 1996 EU Call for Proposals of the i3: Intel-ligent Information Interfaces, an Esprit Long-Term Research initiative. Its aim of i³ (pronounced "eye-cubed") was to develop new human centred interfaces for inter-acting with information, aimed at the future broad population. Links to the Web sites of all the i3 Projects: AMUSEMENT, CAMPIELLO, COMRIS, CO-NEXUS, eRENA, eSCAPE, HIPS, LIME, MAYPOLE, MLOUNGE, PERSONA, POPULATE and PRESENCE, can no longer be found on www.i3net.org/

This approach "was also the starting point and rationale for the EU-funded proactive initiative The Disappearing Computer a cluster of 17 projects by interdisciplinary re-search groups. It started on January 1, 2001 and funded 17 projects. Its mission was "to see how information technology can be diffused into everyday objects and settings, and to see how this can lead to new ways of supporting and enhancing people's lives that go above and beyond what is possible with the computer to-day."20

The third research iteration of this approach was Convivio (2003-2005), a thematic network of researchers and practitioners from many backgrounds (computer sci-ence, human sciences, design, business) developing a broad discipline of human-centred design of digital systems for everyday life. De Michelis (coordinator of Con-vivio): "this (design and arts) community – our community - still has little influence either on governmental and super-national policies or on industrial strategies. As a result, it also has little impact on the quality of ICT in public and private life."

Marc Langheinrich is one of the researchers who has been involved in issues of pri-vacy, security and ethics throughout these trajectories. For this study we interviewed him specifically for his work on the Disappearing Computer Initiative and his 2005 PhD thesis Personal privacy in ubiquitous computing tools and system support.21 The DC Initiative included having 'Troubadours''22, traveling researchers on specific 19 The Connected Community has been developed by Philips International, Domus Academy and Meru Research.

http://cordis.europa.eu/esprit/src/eyecall.htm 20 http://cordis.europa.eu/ist/fet/dc2-in.htm and The Disappearing Computer, Information Document, IST Call for proposals,

February 2000. 21 Langheinrich, M. (2005). Personal privacy in ubiquitous computing tools and system support. Dissertation of the Swiss

Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich. Retrieved from, http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/langheinrich-phd-2005.pdf on Early EU research programmes and their legacy, the effects of i3 and the Disappearing Computer on current EU FP7 and FP8.

22 At the first Disappearing Computer (DC) Jamboree in Zurich in October 2001, a group of researchers within the Ambient Agoras project organized a privacy workshop as part of the meeting program. Apart from members of the Ambient Agoras project itself, researchers from three other projects were present (Gloss, Grocer, and Smart-Its). After a half-day brain-storming session about the nature and attributes of privacy, a follow-up meeting at one of the Ambient Agoras partner sites, Electricité de France (EDF) in Paris, was scheduled for further investigating the actual privacy implications of the in-dividual DC projects. However, during the next meeting in January 2002, it turned out that an individual project assess-ment was nearly impossible without knowing the exact details and provisions of its systems and prototypes. Thus, the idea of a privacy troubadour was born: having a dedicated researcher visit individual DC-projects, it should be possible to answer in detail questions like “Where is data stored?” “Who has access to this data?” or “How long is data retained?” which all seemed to be required to judge a projects privacy implications. Beyond such factual project data, the group moreover hoped to be able to harness specific design experiences with respect to privacy: whenever a decision to pro-cess or store personal information or sensory data was made as part of the system design, the people involved would probably have made some technical or moral judgment as to its effect on user privacy. The group members envisioned soliciting such implicit concerns and unspoken ideas to arrive at privacy guidelines that would have been created from practical experience instead of theoretical analyses. Privacy Troubadour Visiting Schedule: October 2002 Ambient Agoras, Paris, France (internal meeting)

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issues that toured the projects and interviewed the researchers, coders, project managers... For our context it makes sense to quote his conclusions and privacy hypotheses in full:

"The troubadour grant application stated that “a troubadour is not sent as a lecturer offering ready-made solutions to existing privacy threats within a project, but instead be a collaborator of the regular project members trying to increase the social ac-ceptance of the project.” While the reception at all projects was warm and quite of-ten with genuine interest in the topic, the lack of privacy requirements in most projects turned out to short-circuit the idea of collaboratively sorting out the problem of privacy in the Disappearing Computer initiative: input from the troubadour was welcome, but few people had the time and energy to substantially analyse their own work. As long as privacy is situated on a non-critical development path, more im-portant issues such as energy efficiency, code size, or robustness dominate the re-searcher’s to-do lists. Decisions pertaining to data storage and communication details are often improvised and seen as a temporary solution fit for prototype de-ployment. Projects which explicitly had privacy issues as part of their deliverables, generally exhibited greater concern for such issues, even though they often stopped short of generating novel ideas and limited themselves to a broad but shallow sum-mary of general privacy issues, without taking project specific design parameters into account. If a robust culture of privacy awareness is to be fostered among de-signers of ubiquitous computing systems, making such requirements explicit already as part of the project funding process seems to be the most viable approach. Even if designers feel morally responsible, unless either users (in a comprehensive field study) or project officers ask for it, there will hardly be much time and energy to spare. Having a better set of requirements to test prototype systems against would also contribute to the cause, though such technical issues would probably better be tested by a thorough examination of project documentation, together with singular interviews for clearing up specific implementation details. Even though few projects in ubiquitous computing explicitly address privacy in their research agenda, many designers of such system openly acknowledge the fact and reiterate their concern for privacy. With the help of a DC privacy troubadour action, the author envisioned harnessing such implicit concerns and unspoken ideas to create an explicit account of the “state of privacy” on the cumulative minds of ubiquitous computing research-ers. However, after visiting four DC projects at five different locations, it became clear that even though general concerns for privacy remain high, few researchers have actually thought about such problems enough to be providing additional in-sights." (Langheinrich 2003).23

Marc Langheinrich continues: "Over the course of the various interviews and discus-sion, the following hypotheses emerged that would explain why researchers, even

November 2002 Smart-Its, Lancaster, UK December 2002 Oresteia, London, UK January 2003 Smart-Its, Gothenburg, Sweden February 2003 E-Gadgets, Patras, Greece May 2003 Ambient Agoras, Paris, France (internal meeting) May 2003 Interliving, Paris, France

23 See also: Marc Langheinrich: “The DC-Privacy Troubadour – Assessing Privacy Implications of DC-Projects.” Designing

for Privacy Workshop. DC Tales Conference, Santorini, Greece, 2003.

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with a heightened awareness for privacy issues, would not actively pursue the priva-cy implications of their systems:

• Not feeling morally responsible: There were several reasons why re-searchers felt that it was not up to them to provide for privacy awareness in their designs: either lack of applicability to their specific field of expertise (“for [my colleague] it is more appropriate to think about privacy issues. it is not really the case in my case”) or because other social processes were felt to be more adequate to regulate such issues (“little by little – I expect that would be a process of 20 years – that you need a generation actually to sort out, where is the social value, [...] and then formalize the legislation”);

• Not necessary anymore: Some researchers thought existing security mech-anisms to be adequate protection from privacy abuses: “I think all you need is really good firewalls. [...] if you know, or if you are aware of, that this might be a problem, then you are safe.” Similar ideas came up in other interviews: Question: “So you imagine that existing technology would be used?” Answer: “Yes, right" ;

• Not yet necessary: In many cases, researchers thought that only after initial prototypes had been built, a topic like privacy could properly be addressed. One of the many design strategies heard were: “we first thought: let us build this first...” and “my approach is more to really build these things now in order to see what issues arise there”;

• No problem for prototypes: Related to the above point, but with a slightly more practical orientation, were remarks that privacy had not proved to be a problem in this early stage of prototype design. Far more often, designers would identify and tackle problems of energy usage, communication proto-cols, or data analysis, instead of spending creative energy on privacy issues;

• Too abstract of a problem: In some cases, researchers purposefully did not think about privacy: “I think you can’t think of privacy when you are trying out... it is impossible, because if I do it, I have troubles with finding Ubicomp future [laughs], when I think of the privacy issues. but I... and the more I think about it, the more I become sceptical. but... on the other hand, some.... I think it is important that you think about it, but I think you can’t... you can’t... when you are building prototypes and you are trying making design examples you can’t have that...”;

• Not part of deliverables: In one case, four hours had been reserved for priva-cy issues during a two-day meeting. However, the first day the session got cut down to half the time due to extended discussions on getting the final de-liverable into shape. The second day saw the entire rest of the planned priva-cy session cancelled, due to ongoing deliberations about specific implementation details. In another case, interviews were cut short since the researchers had to furnish the newly acquired office space (e.g., unpacking boxes, rushing to IKEA to buy new furniture...)." (Langheinrich 2003).

RvK: Marc, in your Troubadour text you stated: "The few cases that had research-ers explicitly address privacy were few and often shallow." Have you seen change

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for the better in the past decade? Also on the issues you raised as hampering the real deep impact of ethical issues on the process of developing, making and coding services and infrastructures, have you see positive developments?

ML: First of all, let me say how coincidental, or maybe, how timely, these questions are. I am currently involved in assessing ‘smart surveillance’ technology. In the im-pact assessment methodology we are preparing I find that the technologist attitude is still very much an issue and has not really changed from the assumptions I found a decade ago. In fact, in some ways the situation seems to be even worse. In the beginning of 2000 very few people actually could foresee the speed of IoT and could still think that they could develop either in the 'Lab' or in some kind of 'Living Lab', and as such they could play more with real world issues. Yet, it has now become clear that any IoT service, application or infrastructure deployment goes unmediated and directly in normal ordinary everyday life. I still find a certain lack of responsibility on account of the IoT community, researchers and builders. I am not alone in this. In his recent publication “What do IT professionals think about surveillance?” Ivan Székley24 of Tech University of Budapest, states:

"As for our general hypothesis, whereby the IT professionals who design, build or operate the systems that manage personal data have a crucial role in the way these systems handle the personal data of the people concerned, this is fully in line with our collected data.... The one thing that seems clear is that we can describe the role of IT professionals as neither “outright positive” nor “outright negative”; as a whole, they stand neither “for” nor “against” surveillance. What seems perfectly obvious, however, is that if we want to control or limit the emergence of surveillance society, especially in the Internet environment, then the only viable strategy must include the inculcation of IT professionals, or at least a large part of them, so as to encourage them to develop their knowledge and change their attitudes – and we need to do this not in a didactic way, but by taking into account their existing interests. The results of one research project will not suffice to achieve this; we need educational pro-grams, professional platforms and civil initiatives, as well as a meaningful dialogue between IT professionals and the other stakeholders in society."

He is basically confirming my earlier conclusions from 2003: the key is education of both citizens as well as experts into what the results are of a merging of an ana-logue and digital realm into a hybrid reality where notions of privacy and security as we know them now will be subject to strong pressure. Change in itself is not the is-sue. The fact that we do have all the data, that we do have the building blocks for a debate and that this debate is not happening, that is problematic.

RvK: In his 2003 text Lessons learnt from LIVING MEMORY @ 1:3 - listening to and developing technology for ordinary people, Steve Kyffin25 of Philips, involved in the LiMe project that build an interactive table to be used in the neighbourhood and be placed in community centres, bus stops and other local meeting spaces, says:

24 Szekely, Ivan (2011). WHAT DO IT PROFESSIONALS THINK ABOUT SURVEILLANCE? DRAFT to be published in

Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval (eds.) Internet and Surveillance. The Chal-lenge of Web 2.0 and Social Media. New York: Routledge.

25 Kyffin, Steve. Lessons learnt from LIVING MEMORY @ 1:3 - listening to and developing technology for ordinary people. (2003).

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• "USEFUL ...listening to and developing technology for ordinary people sums up what we might refer to as Co-Creative design. Involving the end user in a core and proactive manner at all stages in the product or system creation process.

• RELEVANT ...listening to and developing technology for ordinary people is so relevant because the 'ordinary...ness' is the issue. Much of what we concen-trated on in Living Memory was the means by which people interact with each other (the technology) and the interfaces to that technology, which we offer. It became obvious and apparent from, even before the start, that these interac-tion mechanisms and interfaces had to be, if nothing else, intuitive, non-WORK oriented, adaptive, intelligent and embedded in the natural surround-ings of our everyday ordinary lives. We called it: The Territory as Interface. A measure of the success of these was to what extent people were positively aware and able to experience the "free flow" of meaningful and relevant con-text driven content across the landscape between themselves (people), the places and the events which connected them. We called this the Connective Tissue, which held the community together.

• IMPORTANT ...listening to and developing technology for ordinary people. The world of stuff is not enough... the design discipline is changing fast. As a commercial discipline, design was born into a world whose corporate attrib-utes included the production of stand-alone products and services, a world in which differentiation was achieved through innovation and brand communica-tions culminating in large and complex brand architectures. Design must now respond to an economic model which supports the provision of converged and connected solutions, such as LIME, combining products and services to suit individual needs. Here, differentiation is achieved by providing the right customer experience. Traditionally, design was exploited to create or rein-force product distinctiveness; now, distinction is created through the declara-tion of values, aligning all enterprise's activities on many levels. The results place design in a position to extract and embrace true customer insights gained across all points of contact.

• SUCCESSFUL ...listening to and developing technology for ordinary people. The extent to which the project was successful is the subject of the complete review and validation process, which we conducted. Each of the Partners will have found many points of success. The aspects, which were particularly successful for Philips Design included: The Prototypes: the resolution of all our collective inspiration and insights into the issues of "the role of memory in building social cohesion through open communities" into a connected collec-tion of realized instantiations of the interactive mechanisms, interfaces, infor-mation architectures, intelligent agents and associated software, ...called LIME, which could be fully experienced by ordinary people in a real, natural and every day spectrum of environments. The comprehensive Community Analysis processes, which we developed with Queen Margaret University College...and also very importantly the project, among others has helped us to understand more fully what the conjunction of DESIGN and RESEARCH can bring to a creative agency such as ours. Design is often seen as an ap-plied discipline, where fine art may be regarded as the pure discipline. We

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believe that this is not the case and that it is possible to: research the 'pure' Design discipline in order to develop its future role in differing contexts; to use Design as a research tool to help us better understand and contribute to the changing nature of People, Culture and Society and in turn assist in the inte-gration of emerging and future technologies into the lives of 'ordinary people'; to find more effective tools and research areas for Design to consult and in-vestigate in order to provide more holistic and relevant propositions within our commercial practice.

• INSPIRATIONAL.... listening to and developing technology for ordinary peo-ple. Certainly, in all the ways mentioned above...inspired us to find NEW KNOWLEDGE: NEW ROLES FOR DESIGN: ways to integrate SYNTHETICAL and ANALYTICAL research: NEW IP: seeds for NEW OPEN PRODUCTS-SYSTEMS-SERVICES...

• DIFFERENT ... Research is by definition, DIFFERENT, especially when it is this trans disciplinary, collaborative, human focused, artistic and scientific driven end results in such enriched experiences for people... "

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If we compare this list of successful lessons learned with your list of failed lessons learned, it seems that the industry has been able to capitalize on the early ubicomp and ambient EU projects, enabling them to actualize the idea of the new more par-ticipatory user and user centred design. That is of course a very good outcome, but somehow it feels not right that this had been paid for by public money as the end-

26 Pictures from the LIME Project, by permission of Philips.

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users themselves did not get the ability of end user programming themselves nor were their identities, privacy and socio-cultural dependencies really addressed.

ML: The idea of human computer interaction and user centred design is important and has found its way into design. Any outcome of the early projects that is fuelling this can only be applauded. Yet the connection between security and HCI is still evolving. As for privacy, it is sad to say, but even now, in 2012 there is still not much of awareness among developers of what to do about privacy. Today’s “More is Bet-ter” approach to data collection is present on so many levels – law enforcement, business intelligence, and consumer services (e.g., quantified self) – that the idea of limiting data collection seems not only old-fashioned, but also counter-productive, if not dangerous. Yes, there is a lot of talk, and yes there is the PIA (Privacy Impact Assessment) methodology, but in a way this clouds the fact that there is no funda-mental debate among the majority of the players behind this development:

Is IoT a gradual or ontological shift? Either way you answer you also have to an-swer:

• What values are behind IoT?

• What values should be supported?

We are going fast forward, and ethics seem to be quickly left behind. At that moment we have to decide what is specific to the current iteration and what we as humans believe to be still somehow 'universal' and 'human' values, even if this implies less convenience. With respect to the debate surrounding privacy, this has always been an important quote for me:

"The problem is the possibility of technology taking on a life of its own, so that the actuality and inevitability of technology creates a dictatorship. Not a dictatorship of people over people with the help of technology, but a dictatorship of technology over people." - Ernst Benda (1983), German Federal Constitutional Court (Chief Justice), on the court’s decision to stop the 1983 census and create the novel basic right on “Informational Self-Determination” (Informationelle Selbstbestimmung)

We are in a period of transition, and that is where our agency to negotiate lies. It looks like it is quite inevitable that IoT will be a new mediation between people and technology, but does it have to be a dictatorship of technology over people? I don't think so. I think these developments will not turn immediately into a dictatorship; there is a period of transition. It is our responsibility to make that period tangible, visible and actionable. Just “because we can” should not be the ultimo ratio of how (and why) we develop future IoT systems. Each and every data collection, pro-cessing, and storage should be critically valued for what benefits it brings, and the risks it poses. The only way that this will happen if there is not just awareness among developers and policymakers alike, but an understanding of privacy and its values. And there are some positive developments on the ground. The ACM is in the process of revising its Computer Science curriculum and ethics is now a major part of the new program. Ideally, we should try to get this also in primary and secondary general education.

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And although I am cautious, I do see a change in perceived urgency. A lot of people are interested in doing the right thing and realize that something ought to be done, not immediately looking at cost. The question now is, now the 'smart' people start to care finally, can they get that message across in a non-negative way not only to thought leaders, policymakers and politicians, but also to their peers? Again, educa-tion, education and education is key – if people do not understand what the problem may be, they will not work hard to find a solution... 27

3.2 Invisibility, Cécile Crutzen

Education is the also the key focus of Dr. Dipl.-Math. Cecile K. M. Crutzen, Associ-ate Professor School of Informatics, Open Universiteit Nederland. She is also Do-main coordinator of "People, Computer, Society". According to her:

"The Internet of things will change in the future our environment. In the same way as cars have changed our infrastructure, the government should take more and more the role of a pioneer to establish "traffic rules and laws" for the Internet of Things. At the moment governments are incident driven. They should give the builders and providers of the Internet of Things strict "building" rules to create an internet of things as safe as possible. Citizens should be allowed and should be given spaces of privacy in the Internet of Things where individuals themselves can stipulate the conditions for the import and export of data for the kind of data and in which circum-stances data transport may take place. The Internet of Things, its risks and its pos-sibilities should be part of the primary education of every child in the same way as reading writing and mathematics. Therefore they need to establish more theoretical knowledge and practical experience on the risks of the Internet of Things in the cur-riculum of teacher training. In our society individuals need to interact regular with civil authorities. It should not be allowed to restrict that interaction only via the Inter-net. Other possibilities should be offered without extra costs.”

27 References:

[1] Convivio Network. Available at: http://convivionetwork.net/?page_id=5 [Accessed 22 August] [2] De Michelis. G. Letter to the Convivio community. Available at

http://daisy.cti.gr/webzine/Issues/Issue%201/Letters/index.html [Accessed 22 August] [3] Disappeariing Computer Net [4] IoT-i forum (2011) Internet of things initiative [Internet] [5] Lessig, L. (2006) Code: and other laws of cyberspace, version 2.0, New York: Basic Books. [6] Sterling, B. (2005) Shaping things, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Mediaworks Pamphlets. [7] Streitz, N. A., Kameas, I. Mavrommati (Eds.) (2007), The Disappearing Computer: Interaction Design, System Infra-

structures and Applications for Smart Environments. State-of-the-Art Survey: Springer [8] Thackara, J. (2006) In the bubble: Designing in a complex world, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press [9] Links to i3net.org have disappeared. i3 magazines are still online but must be found individually. For example

www.justinecassell.com/PressClippings/i3summit.pdf [10] Wright, D. (2010) Safeguards in a World of Ambient Intelligence: Springer [11] This approach "was also the starting point and rationale for the EU-funded proactive initiative "The Disappearing

Computer (DC)", a cluster of 17 projects addressing a wide range of themes and issues and therefore being con-ducted by interdisciplinary research groups (Streitz, 2001, and Streitz, N and Nixon, P., 2005 and Streitz, N and Kameas, A, 2007

[12] Langheinrich, M. (2005). Personal privacy in ubiquitous computing tools and system support. Dissertation of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich. Retrieved from, http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/langheinrich-phd-2005.pdf on Early EU research programmes and their legacy, the effects of i3 and the Disappearing Computer on current EU FP7 and FP8.

[13] Szekely, Ivan (2011). WHAT DO IT PROFESSIONALS THINK ABOUT SURVEILLANCE? DRAFT to be published in Christian Fuchs, Kees Boersma, Anders Albrechtslund, and Marisol Sandoval (eds.) Internet and Surveillance. The Challenge of Web 2.0 and Social Media. New York: Routledge.

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Her main issue is that things tend to disappear from view and from the possibility to interact with and get feedback from in an Internet of Things. Let us walk back in the history of computers.

It is 1964, time of the original control console for the first supercomputer1, the CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray and manufactured by the Control Data Corpora-tion (Figure 3). The supercomputer itself is shown in Figure 4. Your average ana-logue computer2 in 1964 would look like the one in Figure 5. Now in 1964 there was a mouse, shown in Figure 6. Figure 7 shows a drawing from Engelbart’s patent, do you recognize it? Yes. It is the only thing that we recognize. It is the only thing that has not changed. It is the interface. From 1964 to 2004 all energy went to distrib-uting system architecture, and centralising system infrastructure. From 1964 to 2004 all energy went to cutting down processor size, and speeding up processor power. Can we afford such one sided innovation when it comes to the merging of the ana-logue and digital with IoT and RFID? Clearly not. Interface is as essential as infra-structure and architecture when it comes to connectivity in the real world.

Figure 3: CDC 6600 control console (1964)

Figure 4: CDC 6600, serial number 0002

Figure 5: average analogue computer at 1964

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Figure 6: mouse from 1964

Figure 7: drawing from Engelbart’s patent

The arguments made by Cécile Crutzen (2006) in Invisibility and the Meaning of Ambient Intelligence are explicitly pertinent: "The Information Society can only be reliable if it is capable to construct, connect and nourish these rooms where doubt-ing the promises of, Ambient Intelligence (AmI), is a habit. Being aware of the rede-sign of borders is a necessary act for creating diversity in interaction rooms — where people and society can choose how the invisible and visible can interact, where they can change their status, where the invisibility could be deconstructed."

• Invisibility;

• Mental invisibility;

• Methodical invisibility;

• Physical Invisibility.

RvK: You have worked on Ambient Intelligence; do you think there are major con-ceptual differences with 'Internet of Things'? Is it just a shift in terms?

“The conceptual difference between AmI and IoT is the focus. AmI is a technology focussed on the "invisible" interaction with humans. IoT is focussed on the techno-logical infrastructure for making things interactive and identifiable. You could per-haps say IoT is one of the options for realising AmI. In a "smart house" field bus systems can be used without a connection to the internet. In some conception of AmI humans are seen as 'things' with data, sensors and activities, only objects in a network of (inter-) activities.“

RvK: How would you describe IoT to non-experts?

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“Starting mentioning the things in our environment, which have already sensors and a connected functionality with the sensors' input of the sensor, such as automatic doors. After the explanation of sensors, you could give an example of a device that stores your activities e.g. a web browser, a mobile telephone. After a lot of already existing IoT you could fantasize together, what kind of functionalities you like to have in a smart house. After the fantasying part I would start a discussion on privacy and the problems which can occur with autonomous acting devices or devices which obey to your AmI provider, but not to you.”

RvK: A key issue for a functioning IoT is adoption by relevant users and social groups. Do you agree?

“Yes, however this adoption is not always voluntary. Social pressure and a strong connection with already existing habits of humans will accelerate the adoption of the IoT.

Domestication of Ambient Intelligence will be forced by jumping on the bandwagon of some fundamental fears of the individual and society such as the present loss of security and safety because of terrorism, the necessary but unaffordable amount of care for the elderly and the sick, handling the complexity of combining professional and home work, difficulties in coping with the overwhelmingly obtrusive interactions and information of our society and being dependent on the gridlocked transport sys-tem. So-called “Killer” applications are largely motivated and justified with providing a bit more security for the individual (Wahlster, 2004).

The Ambient Intelligence developers focus on substitutes and prostheses for the human touch in the care of children, the elderly and the disabled: “When daily con-tact is not feasible, the decision to move a senior is often driven by fear and uncer-tainty for his or her daily well-being. Our goal is to create a surrogate support system that resurrects this informal daily communication.” (Mynatt, 2001, p. 340). And the providers openly promote their technology staking on social fears: “We trust less and we fear more. We will therefore be searching for reassurance and guarantees. … We will welcome tools that allow us to monitor the health of our loved ones or ourselves, tools that allow quick links with emergency services, or tools that ‘tag’ our children so that we know where they are. In short how can our technologies look after us and our environments rather than us looking after our technology”. (Philips Research 2003, p. 35).

Single purpose Ambient Intelligence applications will be connected for continuous monitoring of the individual with the strong suggestion that this provides security and maintains health (Friedewald 2003). These single purpose applications will enforce the adaptive behaviour of humans to more complex and integrated applications of intelligent structures. Of course emergency situations with an impact on peoples’ physical and psychological well-being could imply “that a service or tool that assists people should be easy for the person to use, should not require much thinking or complicated actions, and should be easily and readily accessible” (Kostakos, 2004).

But humans are not always in emergency situations in contrary to the suggestions of the providers. The interpretation of the meaning of “a better life” in Ambient Intelli-gence is “taking away the worries” of a possibly unstable future. People are claimed vulnerable and naked without an artificial skin of input and output devices.”

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RvK: However, many individuals remain concerned by the privacy issues associated with IoT systems. Here, your arguments (2006) in Invisibility and the Meaning of Ambient Intelligence are: "The Information Society can only be reliable if it is capa-ble to construct, connect and nourish these rooms where doubting the promises of, ambient intelligence (AmI), is a habit. Being aware of the redesign of borders is a necessary act for creating diversity in interaction rooms — where people and society can choose how the invisible and visible can interact, where they can change their status, where the invisibility could be deconstructed." Can you elaborate a little it on this?

“I have introduced the concept of the Critical Transformative Room (CTR). A critical transformative room is a space between users and their technological devices where the preferred interpretation of the actions of the artificial actors can be negoti-ated, where doubt can occur as a constructive strategy and can be effective in a change of the acting itself; the acting of both the human actors and the artificial ac-tors. In a CTR doubt can lead to actions of inquiring. It is a space between interpre-tation and representation of the offered (ready-made) interactions of the technology.

Differences and different meaning construction processes are respected. In contrary to doubt, change is not the determining and defining aspect of a critical transforma-tive room. In any interaction environment actions and interactions cause changes. Doubt is situated in the interaction itself by questioning the caused visible and invisi-ble changes.

A CTR is always individual. It is the design (construction) of the intertwining of use and (re) design activities of an individual. The process of intertwining design and use depends always on the needs and the wishes of the individual and is situated in the interaction. It needs the presence-at-hand of the artificial intelligent environment and it depends on the actor’s affective disposition and state of mind.

The borders of a CTR are frozenness of use on the one side; and on the other side, the despair of a forced continuous design. The border "frozenness" is a mental invis-ibility of the human actor towards the used technology device. The human actor is only using without thinking anymore, how it could be used. The use has become a routine acting.

The other border of a CTR is despair in the meaning of continuous doubting and redesigning the use of our technological environment. Under the aspect of “use” as an integration of ready-made technological actions in human activity, based on ex-periences, humans are always in a process of gaining a certain status of mental in-visibility. This status has a risk, to be frozen in a frame; in a limited scale of possible actions in specific situations.

If human behaviour could not be based partially on individual or collective routine and habits, life would become no longer liveable. Human actors would be forced at each moment to decide about everything. Faced with the amount and complexity of those decisions they would not be able to act anymore. Humans would place them-selves in a complete isolation and conflict, where they cannot accept and adapt even the most obvious interpretations and representations of other human actors on their technological environment. They would be in the stress of constantly redesign-ing their environment.

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There will be always a dilemma between frozen use and continuous design. It is the individual user and the society who should be allowed to solve this dilemma in a re-spectful and ethical way. Every action and interaction in our environment causes changes, but not all activities of actors and the chances they have caused, are pre-sent in interaction worlds. It depends on the attentiveness and the perception of the human actors.

And above that a lot of actions of an intelligent environment are physically invisible. The meanings given to artificial actors and their acting representations by a human actor rely on the existing meaning constructions. If changes caused by interaction are comparable and compatible with previous changes, then they will be perceived as obvious. They are taken for granted. This kind of interaction will not cause any doubt. The interaction with technology can become obvious if humans do not think anymore about the actions they are doing with that technology. These actions are part of their routine acting. A lot of ready-made technology devices and structures are interaction partners in our daily life; they become and are mentally invisible.

Technical devices in our environment should allow humans and even invite them to create a CTR where they can negotiate the interactions with the critical devices. However not a lot of humans are today capable or willing to start that negotiation process.

A lot of technological devices offer only a closed world of interaction possibilities. If humans want to act in a different way, not taking over the dominant (preferred) meaning, embedded by the designers and the providers their activities are mostly seen as errors and failures from dissidents.

Users who do not act with the technical environment as it was modelled and imple-mented by the designers and provider are seen as stupid or technophobic. Doubt is seen as an unwanted feeling of insecurity and not as necessary prerequisite for change. Domination and ignorance in a closed world cause this hierarchical opposi-tion between doubt and security. To change routine acting is always very difficult because routine does not have much presence in each world of interaction. Moreo-ver, in closed worlds interaction routines and habits are frozen and creating doubt is seen as an unpleasant activity.

Especially in Ambient Intelligence environments not all activities of the artificial ac-tors are visible, but being attentive to the change process users can reconstruct the invisible.

Attentiveness can open up the closed artificial interaction environment that is inhab-ited by the designers and their artificial products. It is then a mere construction of actors being in interaction with actions of questioning and doubting, which have the potential to change their habits and routines in their interaction.

Such a strategy is helpful for breaking through the obvious acting. It can give the act of doubting a positive meaning: causing doubt, thinking and feeling doubt are nec-essary moments in an interaction for changing the interaction itself. By creating a “leavable and reliable” (the two meanings of Verlässlichkeit) critical transformative room the separation of use and design can be blown up and users in their acting with artificial environments can intertwine use and design through doubting and ne-

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gotiating the ready-made interactions. Doubt is the first step for creating openings and redecorations in the room between humans and their environment. The ques-tion is: Can Ambient Intelligence environments be critical transformative rooms? Can they qualify as open environments? Are then shadows between the visible and invisible enough inducement for doubt? Or will the domestication of Ambient Intelli-gence technology be ruled by fear?”

RvK: How can we see this in concrete terms?

“The user interaction in Ambient Intelligence environments, fenced in between forced routine and despair is shrunken to only an on-off switch. If you are e.g. in a position of needing care and this care can only be delivered by an intelligent envi-ronment then you cannot use the off-switch anymore. It should be ethical responsi-bility of the care-providers that you could negotiate what kind of activities and data-exchange the technological environment may be allowed.”

The Privacy Coach, produced by a small Dutch consortium of RFID experts, is an application running on a mobile phone that supports customers in making privacy decisions when confronted with RFID tags (Broenink and others, 2011). It functions as a mediator between customer privacy preferences (Fischer-Hübner, 2011) and corporate privacy policies, trying to find a match between the two, and informing the user of the outcome.

“These apps are a good start because you can make visible the consequences of the tags and this presence could be the starting of a negotiation process. According to Langheinrich transparency of what data is collected and how it will be used is necessary. Transparency and trust tools should be made compulsory by law to force data collectors to describe their collection policies and should be controlled by gov-ernmental trustful institutions. These tools increase the “trust in a transaction or data exchange, by providing additional background information about the transfer, its conditions, and the parties involved”. They “link directly into our previously identified social mechanism of trust, as they can provide assurances upon which users can make trust decisions due to incomplete knowledge about their interaction partner.” Transparency tools cannot “prevent the abuse of personal data through malicious parties, but can help respectable collectors of our personal data to use our infor-mation in accordance with the preferences and limitations that are given by the sub-jects of the data collection.” (Langheinrich, 2005).

These apps could be more useful if it is possible to disable the tag.

Without transparency humans will be without informational rights. However the invis-ibility of the data collection in Ambient Intelligence is not a mistake but intentional – therefore there will be no correction efforts. In most cases if you do not allow the data collection and exchange of your personal data you cannot use the ready-made interaction, e.g. you cannot buy the tagged product.

The requirement for transparency in high complex intelligent environments and the many, divergent different aims and events of data collection cannot take place with-out overstraining the person from which the data are collected. This stress will lead to inadequate wishes for mental invisibility or could lead to the other border of the CTR: despair. Roßnagel recommends a built-in technology that automatically rec-

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ognises, identifies and memorises a data access. Only the cases for which the sub-ject did not give permission or in which the given limitations are overruled should be reported (Roßnagel, 2007).”28

Privacy was named by the originator of ubicomp, Mark Weiser, the late chief scien-tist at Xerox Parc as a key issue (Weiser, 1991). Machina Research, in association with Latitude, Council and Info.nl – a trio of web 2.0 consultancy companies – re-cently ran an web survey, polling views on the future internet of things. One of the questions was related to concerns that people may have about living in a future connected environment. Privacy was mentioned by a clear majority, as a key issue. Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) are a partial solution. The Privacy Coach, produced by a small Dutch consortium of RFID experts, is an application running on a mobile phone that supports customers in making privacy decisions when confront-ed with RFID tags (Broenink and others, 2011). It functions as a mediator between customer privacy preferences (Fischer-Hübner, 2011) and corporate privacy poli-cies, trying to find a match between the two, and informing the user of the outcome. Gérald Santucci, key IoT architect and head of Unit Knowledge Sharing: "in the fu-ture, the right to privacy, whatever we do to implement it with technology and/or reg-ulations ("right to be forgotten", "right to oblivion", "right to silent chips", etc.), will become a subset of ethics. The future is (largely) about ethics-by-design”. He con-tinues:

“The main problem today, and for the next few years, is not only to determine if and how we will preserve our right to privacy but what will be the place of human beings in a society in which the largest population will be the one made of smart objects enabled by ICT with the attributes of "subjects". If you deeply think about it, the no-tion of time has disappeared from our intellectual life. We will probably not build ca-thedrals, as we did in the Middle Ages, any longer, as we prefer to live in the instant where people don't care much about knowing if the "dashboards" possess "full track-back capacity". The problem we see is that it is not only the state and its institutions

28 References:

Crutzen C.K.M./ Hein H.-W. (2009): ‘Invisibility and Visibility; the Shadows of the Artificial Intelligence’, in: J. Vallverdu, D. Casacuberta (Eds): Handbook of Research on Synthetic Emotions and Sociable Robotics: New Applications in Affective Com-puting and Artificial Intelligence, IGI-Global. p. 472-500.

Friedewald, M., & Da Costa, O. (2003). Science and technology roadmapping: Ambient intelligencein everyday life (Aml@Life). JRC/IPTS - ESTO Study, July 2003. Retrieved from, http://forera.jrc.ec.europa.eu/documents/SandT_roadmapping.pdf

Kostakos, V., O’Neill, E. (2004). Pervasive computing in emergency situations. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Seventh Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 5-8, 2004, Computer Society Press.

Langheinrich, M. (2005). Personal privacy in ubiquitous computing tools and system support. Dissertation of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zürich. Retrieved from, http://www.vs.inf.ethz.ch/publ/papers/langheinrich-phd-2005.pdf

Mynatt, E. D., Rowan, J., Craighill, S., & Jacobs, A. (2001) Digital family portraits: Providing peace of mind for extended family members. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2001) (pp. 333-340). Seat-tle, Washington: ACM Press. Philips Research (2003). 365 days – Ambient Intelligence research in HomeLab. www.research.philips.com/technologies/misc/homelab/downloads/homelab_365.pdf

Roßnagel, A. (2007). Datenschutz in einem informatisierten Alltag. Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung,Berlin. Retrieved from, http://library.fes.de/pdffiles/stabsabteilung/04548.pdf

Wahlster, W. et al. (2004, September). Grand challenges in the evolution of the information society. ISTAG Report. European Communities. Retrieved from, ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/ist/docs/2004_grand_challenges_web_en.pdf

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(police etc.) that are already implementing City@ (the next level of the “smart city”), it is ourselves. Two examples:

i. The data-driven life as outlined by Wolf (2010) examines how individuals are today becoming ever keener on discovering self-knowledge through the use of numbers (e.g. Nike+, DirectLife);

ii. Real-life is being replaced by the dream of eternity via digital life (Saenz, 2010) as outlined by those in the Transhuman and Singularity movements.

There is no fatality. The future will be the one that humans will shape together. The Internet of Things may generate "utopia" or "1984" with the same technologies: a world where technology empowers individuals or a world where individuals lose con-trol of their lives. We are at a crossroads and the opportunity window is narrow and short. We cannot walk away from our future. But to make it create a better world, we cannot walk away either from our individual and collective responsibilities." (Person-al communication.)29

So how do we engage as individuals with such seemingly fatalities? How can we find the courage not to run away or to be swamped by what seems something so vast and so multi-layered that we find it neigh impossible to even begin to think that we could have agency? Because things are getting worse.

Not only do we as citizens and as developers do not want to be or simply are too busy to be worried about or aware of the fact that what we consume and build is no longer a stand-alone artefact but one that always stands in relationship to others. Nor do we seem to understand that convenience of use goes with the cost of losing skillsets and expertise that have been slowly build up over time, and if we do we seem to predominantly go for the option that offers more ease of use anyway. We also do not seem to understand what a deep paradigm shift the Internet of Things is.

3.3 Inevitability, Alicia Benessia & Justin McKeown

29 References:

1. Mark Weiser, The Computer for the Twenty-First Century, Scientific American, pp. 94-10, September 1991 2. Evolution, Alienation and Gossip, The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century, Kate Fox 3. Ethical Know-How, Action, Wisdom and Cognition, Francisco J. Varela, Stanford University Press, California, 1992,

p. 17 4. 1 Manufacturer: Control Data Corporation, CDC 6600, serial number: 0002, designer: Seymour Cray, original cost of

computer: $6 million 2 EAI analog computer, Model TR-20 Manufacturer: EAI, Inc. Original Price: $10,000 - Original Date: 1964 3 From: Chris Hutchings, Sent: Saturday, January 25, 2003 1:18 AM, Subject: Re: the future of... 6 "Gossip is the human equivalent of 'social grooming' among primates, which has been shown to stimulate produc-tion of endorphins, relieving stress and boosting the immune system. Two-thirds of all human conversation is gossip, because this 'vocal grooming' is essential to our social, psychological and physical well-being. Mobiles facilitate gos-sip. Mobiles have increased and enhanced this vital therapeutic activity, by allowing us to gossip 'anytime, anyplace, anywhere' and to text as well as talk. Mobile gossip is an effective and important new stress-buster." Evolution, Al-ienation and Gossip, The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century, By Kate Fox 8 Living Memory (LiME), a project initially sponsored by the European Commission, seeks not to replace geographic communities with digital ones, but rather to enhance neighbourhood cohesiveness with a computerized collective conscious. 9 Ambient Devices announced a line of "personal dashboards", at the International Consumer Electronics Show, “The Ambient Dashboard will be available at fine home accessories and consumer product retailers by Father's Day, 2004.”, http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ambient-devices-announces-personal-dashboards-58808577.html

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Alice Benessia, of IRIS, Università degli Studi di Torino takes the debate one step back and asks if we still have a choice in these developments:

Do we really want to be smart?30

She investigates the kinds of imaginaries of IoT there are, as emergent information technologies (IT) constantly redefine the texture of our culture, society and lifestyle. This raises a number of fundamental epistemic, normative and ethical issues, in a constant co-evolution. Her main questions are the hardest to address:

• Can we still question the inevitability?

• Can we question the seamlessness?

• How real is the public consultation?

• What type of world is IoT facilitating? What are we losing and what are we winning? Can we balance that?

As the discourse surrounding IoT deals with risks, but these risks are thought from a policy perspective. As a major economic course the decision to embrace IoT is made as a necessary macroeconomic IT operation and the tendency is to focus on the positive aspects and on 'let us fix it as we move ahead'. These positive aspects however have some inherent contradictions.

If we look back to the etymological roots of the word 'Thing' we encounter 'Ding' which also pointed to 'matters of fact and matters of concern' and at one particular historical point and actual gathering of people on a specific issue that was seen to be of paramount importance to the survival of the clan, family, system or group. Ding meant the issue that brings people together is precisely that issue which divides them. It is not an issue that can be thought 'away', it needs to be addressed as it is denoting changes on an ontological level, a new paradigm. So, what are things that IoT is supposed to address? If objects become augmented, then objects will be vir-tual, digital and analogue. If all these things have identity, agency, and intelligence, where does that leave 'us'? Are we also the things?

These issues are the hard questions to address if we would really want an Internet of Things, if we should strive for IoT, and if we should be actively engaged in build-ing it. Not addressing these questions leads to leaving the field wide open to activ-ists and groups who will oppose IoT as 'Big Brother' and 'Matrix' (see the discussion on Panopticon in Council)31. This is the unease that we feel in the Public Consulta- 30 Abstract: These technologies are constructed, named, offered, and ultimately regulated, according and through specific

techno-scientific imaginaries, here defined as collections of visual and verbal metaphors that are created and communi-cated both in the specialized literature and in the mass media for the public at large. These imaginaries are embedded in an overarching narrative of techno-scientific innovation and they are functional to secure and sustain its corollaries, namely competitiveness and growth. The institutional ethical discourse about the IoT essentially identifies the issues of digital identity, privacy and security as the critical implications of IT innovation that need to be publicly addressed. While acknowledging the relevance of these concerns, we would like to focus on the consequences of the proposed positive sides of the envisioned IoT revolution, reflecting on some of their inherent contradictions.

31 New Years Contest!: Panopticon as a metaphor of the Internet of Things – why not? But if it were the opposite? Panopti-con as a metaphor of the Internet of Things – why not? But if it were the opposite? (full text with notes in pdf) Recently, the ‘Council on the Internet of Things’ website published an article in Chinese by Yongmou Liu, Associate Professor of Philosophy of Science and Technology, School of Philosophy, Renmin University of China, which is a warning against the danger of the Internet of Things becoming 'a domineering tool'. The Panopticon is used as a metaphor for describing a “surveillance society” where technology is extensively and routinely used to track and record human activities and move-

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tion. IoT is too many things at the same time; it is a 'reality', a 'vision' and it is not something that we can choose not to want, as it is embedded in the standard imagi-naries of the grand narrative of Innovation: welfare still associated with indefinite consumption growth and new pathways of consumption.

It is not so much the fact that the deep question "is this inevitable as a technological operation becoming a new communicative foundation?" is not addressed, or that the negative view on privacy and security is fore-grounded, that is problematic. The most problematic imaginaries, the so called 'positive ones' are incapable of escaping in any way from the stabilising narrative that is foregrounding the four types of imag-inaries: wonder, power, control, urgency, and are thus not capable of raising a real human longing and enthusiasm for IoT. The IoT scenarios in the movies that you can find on Youtube32 are part of the grand narrative of innovation, and set forth IoT as inevitable. Targeting 'you' as an individual, IoT is offering you a 'seamless' expe-rience in everyday life as you float in and out new experiences of connectivity. Noth-ing comes between you and your agenda. Everything is just on time. It is a world in which the house itself can be digitally immersed as a wood full of adventure, yet the children will not play outside, and certainly not in a wood anymore. What kind of people does children that grow up like that, become? Is 'getting lost' a bad thing? Is optimising time always good? Do you want to be told your daily schedule while you are brushing your teeth?

Justin McKeown: On Human Beings and Being Human: Ethics and The Internet of thingsiii

Behold, I show you the Last Man. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is star? Thus asks the Last Man, and he blinks… Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same, whoever feels different goes voluntarily into the madhouse… “We have invented happiness,” say the Last Men, and they blink…33

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The drive towards the Internet of Things and the recent UK government attempt to launch the concept to industry and academia heralds a time where not only the means by which we relate may change drastically but also the very definition of what it means to be human will also be challenged. While in many ways we may imagine the advent of the Internet of Things not only as the first major evolutionary step in the existence of the internet, we also may conceive of it as a step in the evolution of our species; for as research has shown the brain already treats tools including com-puters as temporary parts of the body and thus, phenomenologically speaking we are more amalgams of man and machine that we may realise34. The potential of-

ments in ways invisible to ordinary people as they are watched and monitored. We can find already today examples of this in the tracking and recording of travel and use of public services, the frequent use of CCTV, the analysis of buying habits and financial transactions, and the workplace monitoring of telephone calls, e-mail and Internet use. http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/content/new-years-contest-panopticon-metaphor-internet-things-%E2%80%93-why-not-if-it-were-opposite.

32 A day made of glass; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38 or Internet of Things by IBM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfEbMV295Kk

33 Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann, in Portable Nietzsche, New York, 1954, p129. 34 Angelo Maravita and Atsushi Iriki. Tools for the body (schema) http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-

scienc-es//retrieve/pii/S1364661303003450?_returnURL=http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661303003450?showall=true site last accessed 10.10.2012.

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fered by the technology underpinning the Internet of Things is extreme and, as with all extremes, opinion on its deployment is widely divided. At the root of these divi-sions are issues of ethics and agency with those on either side of the divide perceiv-ing the challenges enmeshed in the technology to be the key to man’s emancipation or total enslavement. While some are preoccupied with such techno-utopian dreams (or nightmares) of augmented life I cannot help but feel that – if we are to become Übermensch rather than letzte Mensch - before we step off down the road towards the post-human we're all going to have to learn to become fully human first. To be clear: We will have to become cognizant of our humanity and take on all the respon-sibilities that come with it. This will require serious consideration of all our ugliness as much as all our beauty.

If our goal is to overcome – as opposed to rot in our own sediment - we must recog-nise that if we allow the agenda underlying the Internet of Things to be driven purely by market forces, scientific thought and technocracy then, ceteris paribus, life will be reduced to an economy of convenience dictated by market forces and their ever in-creasing drive toward efficiency. Within this man will be reduced to a cog transmog-rifying human capital into wealth for the machine that holds him. His very Will will become – like all signs of life - a symptom to be cured of. “We have invented happi-ness,” say the Last Men, and they blink.

It is said that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. While this may be true, one might also speculate that in the early 21st century it may also be paved with smart phones and tablet computers. These devices have obliterated the revolution-ary potential promised in the early days of the world wild web wherein users had to be not only consumers of media but also tech-savvy producers not simply of con-tent; but platforms. These egalitarian dreams now seem like distant memories: a fuzz in the mind like that left behind after a really good party. The web has since been sanitized – and will be sanitised even more - by commerce in its drive to mine the network potential of so much conversation and welled concentration of attention.

The most iconic of smart phone and tablet computer platform-products are those designed by Jonathan Ive’s and his team at Apple. The German industrial designer Dieter Rams whose own iconic designs for Braun had a significant effect on Ive’s design philosophy remarked that ‘There is no longer room for irrelevant things. We have no longer got the resources. Irrelevance is out.’35 In considering this in relation to the design of smart phone and tablet devices it would seem that what has be-come irrelevant is the need for empowering technical knowledge in order to partici-pate in the network. Now the significant thing has become making devices simple enough to be intuitive so end users are freed up to create and consume content; but not create platforms. While this is an interesting factor to consider in terms of the evolution of the web and signs of its future agency, what is perhaps more significant is the fact that Rams is not alone in the drive towards cutting out irrelevance: one need only refer to the United Nations Agenda 2136 document, which sets out a map for sustainable global development to realise the prescience of Rams’ remarks and indeed the seriousness of this subject for man kind at this very moment in history.

35 http://niroism.com/2010/01/30/dieter-rams-ten-commandments-for-good-design/ site last accessed 10.09.2012. 36 http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/ site last accessed 21st Sept 2012.

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Yet with the drive to cut out irrelevance in the name of sustainability and efficiency, we are forced to develop criteria through which to assess irrelevance. This is a de-ceptively complex issue for what is irrelevant to business and markets are not the same things that are irrelevant to individual human beings. Yet as the Cluetrain Manifesto of the late 90s with its mantra of Markets are conversations37 reminded us that business and markets are social milieus comprised of human beings. Thus how can their criteria for irrelevance be so seemingly different? In considering this we butt up against those aspects of man that may be considered ugly: greed, envy, ruthlessness, fear, revenge et al. Yet just because these things may be considered ugly or undesirable does not mean that they should be considered irrelevant. Their recognition must be part of our emerging social discourse that will lead us to devel-op as a species.

In contrast to recognising the more ugly or negative aspects of our being we must also acknowledge the aesthetic and its expression through art, romance and play. These aspects of our being are evermore considered social irrelevancies. If anyone doubts this all they need do is examine the areas most badly affected by govern-mental austerity measures in Europe, for example the Cuts to Arts funding in the UK38. If we remove the cultural articulations of the things which in themselves are the liminal edges of our knowledge then we will be left only with a machine. Let us not forget in our haste that – to borrow another sentiment from Nietzsche - ‘One must have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star’39 and further, that the seeds of chaos are found in active aesthetic experiences.

To surmise, bound up in the desire to eliminate the irrelevant is the drive towards an economy of efficiency. Within this is the preposition that some aspects of life are superfluous and therefore expendable. Yet those aspects that are viewed as such are frequently those things that are most quintessentially human. One must recog-nise that the drive to eliminate irrelevance in the name of efficiency is, if carried to the absolute logical extreme, the logic of the death camps. As a species we’ve been down that road before and we know what lies at the end of it. To attempt to become fully human is the only viable option no matter how difficult or painful it may sound to us.

Thus, in contending with the question of how the integration of the Internet of Things might be possible without succumbing to some form of techno-utopian fascism we must recognise that what we are discussing is implementing a new system of power. In recognising this we must acknowledge that to create a system of power is to im-pose a social dynamic. At the root of this new system of power is the desire to find a means by which we might construct a symbiotic approach to systems of power and the social through technological evolution. In his report titled Ethics Report Venice IoT week Rob Van Kranenburg acknowledges the potential challenges we may face in terms of the potential for inadvertently creating techno-utopian fascism through the deployment of the Internet of Things. This is made most explicit in his report when he cites Ernest Benda, who stated:

The problem is the possibility of technology taking on a life of its own, so that the actuality and inevitability of technology creates a dictatorship. Not a dictatorship of 37 Rick Levine et al., The Cluetrain Manifesto, Basic Books, pxiii. 38 http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/mar/30/arts-funding-cuts-fear-future site last accessed 26 Sept 2012. 39 Frederic Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathstra, p46.

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people over people with the help of technology, but a dictatorship of technology over people.40

Building on Benda’s sentiments it is worth considering that somewhere in the middle to late part of the last century the locus of fascism began to migrate from human beings into machines and legislative systems. Today fascism evermore resides in the systems we continue to build for ourselves. The technological implications of the Internet of Things bring another layer to this complexity, but they are not the only layer and therefore technology should not be cited as the soul source of this prob-lem.

In considering the problems of the various faces of fascism one is forced to cast an eye to history so as to consider the relative differences and similarities of both for-mer Soviet and Capitalist systems of power and the subsequent social dynamics that they gave birth to. In so doing one must acknowledge that while the problem of the Soviet East was the right to free speech one of the unacknowledged problems of the Capitalist West has been the right to be properly heard. Thus while communist systems were aggressive in their repression of free speech capitalist systems can be just as aggressive in their indifference to what is being said. If we are to build a world for human beings - or indeed post-human beings - then we need to think about this matter very carefully, for if the machine or its algorithm will not function properly for one person at the point of interface then the person is left hanging while the rest of the machine turns oblivious and indifferent. In that moment technological dictatorship comes into being for the individual who is powerless to respond to it. One need only look at things such as the actual functioning of social security sys-tems in the UK to know the social problems that the deployment of legislative sys-tems through technology can have when interfacing with human beings. People must be people first and data second. It is often the other way round when it comes to conceiving of legislation. This issue must be rectified if the Internet of Things is to avoid being a system of technological dictatorship.

Such concerns may be seen as the flip side of the utopian vision of the Internet of Things expressed by Han-Jürgen Kugler and Stefan Ferber:

The Internet of Things & Services is a major driver for technological development and will dramatically change products, services, and markets. It not only empowers people to collaborate, but any product or service developed by people – or those emerging from such collaboration. The technology will definitely change business, but the social implications will change our society beyond our wildest dreams. We are in the transition to a new society: We are in the 2nd Renaissance.41

While their optimism is to be admired the Utopian nature of this vision obscures the challenges previously addressed in this text. Further, while I am in agreement with the notion that we may be entering into a second Renaissance - one that is techno-logical - I am also aware that the inverse may be said in terms of other aspects of our development. For while we may be in a technological 2nd Renaissance - indeed

40 Ernst Benda (1983), German Federal Constitutional Court (Chief Justice), on the court’s decision to stop the 1983 census

and create the novel basic right on 'Informational Self- Determination' (Informationelle Selbstbestimmung). Cited by Rob Van Kranenburg, Ethics Report Venice IoT week, p16.

41 Hans-Jürgen Kugler and Stefan Ferber, The Internet of Things & Services: Renaissance Re-Born, cited by Rob Van Kranenburg in Ethics Report Venice IoT week, p2.

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the governmental drive towards big Data and interdisciplinary research in universi-ties confirms this - our development in the history of ideas and philosophy may be heading in the opposite direction. It is important that I take a moment to clarify what I mean.

The Renaissance was the historical moment when man began to stop basing his philosophical assertions on questions of the unknown or supernatural. It was in this moment that a move towards science and reason began. Man began to look at the world around him to try and reason out his relationship to it based on empirical facts. To put it simply he began to stop asking ‘what if’ and began instead to start asking ‘what is’. Yet since the tragic events of September 11th we have made a sharp leap back towards ‘what if’ as an organising principle of the logic through which we struc-ture the social.

As a result we have passed many repressive laws and created a much more policed less trusting society. Thus while it can be argued that we are entering a technologi-cal 2nd renaissance it can also be argued that we may be entering something of an ideological 2nd Dark Age. This is a startling thought, but one that we should fully consider in trying to weigh up the question of how to contend with the challenges of still not being fully cognisant of our humanity while striving for a post-human state of being through the deployment of the Internet of Things.

The idea that the ‘IoT is setting forth a new ontology’42 is a very interesting proposal. In recent times I am inclined to argue that within the western social milieu ontologi-cal questions of Being have been supplanted by more mundane questions of Ap-pearing. Thus where once man wondered things such as if there was a god, what happens to us when we die or what does it mean to exist. Instead we now worry about how we are seen to be: what do my clothes say about me, that thing I said in the meeting the other day, how was it viewed in terms of my agency? What does that photograph on Facebook of me say to people looking at my profile etc. Being has been replaced by Appearing and thus ontology is becoming more obscure as a subject of everyday human consideration. The ontological potential of the Internet of Things is great especially when one considers the notion of interfacing networked sensors with the human form. Though the danger is that because the agenda un-derpinning the Internet of Things is currently being driven by business interests we are more likely to see ontology made obsolete as a topic of discourse for all but the most educated of humans. Or conversely it may become a technological or opera-tional specialism, one which forgets its original meaning supplanting it with ques-tions of how prosthesis may extend the space of being rather than Being as philosophical subject matter in itself. If either of these things were to happen then we would certainly be entering a 2nd philosophical dark age.

In considering the potential impact of the Internet of things upon the cohesion of so-ciety Rob Van Kranenburg asks:

What kind of people do children that grow up like that become? Is getting lost a bad thing? Is optimising time always good? Do you want to be told your daily schedule while you are brushing your teeth?43

42 Ibid p2. 43 Rob Van Kranenburg in Ethics Report Venice IoT week, p5.

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In raising these points Van Kranenburg confronts us with some of the most signifi-cant questions we may have to answer when considering the implementation of the Internet of Things. Attempting to answer these questions may go some way to ne-gating the dangers of much of the Utopian rhetoric prevalent on the subject of auto-mated society. While answering these questions is beyond the scope of this text, what is significant to note with regards them is that it is man’s attempt to grapple with the unknown and even unknowable aspects of being that arouses human stimulation and therefore encourages individual humans to develop. Thus if our chil-dren were to grow up in a fully automated world would we not lose the sense of en-quiry that has characterised our development as a species from cave dwellers making fire to scientists making atom bombs? If the challenge were removed from life by optimising everything wouldn’t we be removing one of the most significant catalysts to both individual and societal development? If we were to do this regard-less then we would have to look to game theory and game structures in order to find ways to simulate challenges in our optimized society. We would thus have to build challenges into the automation of our optimized society. The significant question is would these synthesised challenges be as effective as real challenges since we would know that they are synthesised?

In contemplating the drive for optimisation there is again a correlation to the idea of efficiency. Why is the notion of efficiency so culturally significant yet unconsidered as a philosophical discourse? Further, if we were to achieve maximum efficiency what would be the result and, moreover, what would we do next? In his Book Nega-tive Horizon Paul Virilio critiques, among other subjects, globalism and transnational States. Within this he offers us the proposition that behind the seduction of totalising forms is that fact that ‘people don’t want to die they want to be dead’44. To rephrase this within the context of this text: people want total order so they no longer have to feel the sensations of being alive; perhaps because the stresses of modern life are too intense for the modus operandi of the western human psyche in the early twen-ty-first century is stress. Optimisation therefore may seem to offer a cure, but does it or will it simply compound the problem by creating more room for more pressure?

Inherent in the notion of optimisation is the notion that there is an optimal state of being. While this may not sound like such an outlandish proposal it is worth consid-ering that different human beings want and need different types of experience so as to induce specific mental states in order to engage in certain forms of activity. Here I am specifically thinking of artists, musicians and other creatives who require specific types of experiences that other people may find odd in order to stimulate their crea-tive acts. Art is a material means of thinking about and discussing the conditions of Being both as a phenomena in itself and as a socially shared living reality. As such it is not uncommon for artists to seek new configurations of experience – either private or shared - so as to probe the boundaries of being. As French philosopher Michel Foucault observed in his book Madness and Civilisation wherein the closing chapter he delves into the relationship of art to madness: ‘there is nothing that the madness of men invents that is not either nature made manifest or nature restored’45.

As such one must be very careful to ensure robust criteria for the definition of no-tions such as optimisation and optimal states of being. It is therefore healthy to be

44 Paul Virlio, Negative Horizon, Continuum Press, London, p169. 45 Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilisation, Routledge, London, p283.

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wary of current urges to standardise life and indeed diagnose non-standard ways of being as either deviant or sick, for example Oppositional Defiant Disorder46. We must recognize all forms of being as equally valid if we are to introduce the Internet of Things in a way that is an enhancement rather than a restraint; that is if we are seeking to allow people to choose the terms of their being for themselves and so ensure that ontology does not become a specialist discourse.

Building on the subject of ontology, in Ethics Report Venice IoT week Rob Van Kranenburg quotes Gérald Santucci general remarks:

There clearly is a momentum for ethics as an umbrella to discuss what it means to be human, and what it means to be a machine in IoT. This is a very recent devel-opment. It shows that ethics is essential in discussing in collective awareness what we are going to with the technologies that comprise IoT. It may go too far to say that there is an autonomous trajectory, but for sure today the objects that we create are not only stories of how we live, these objects become subjects somewhere along the interaction paths that we have with them. This was beautifully shown in the exercise by Angela Pereira and Paula Curvelo. Objects are not so far from becoming sub-jects, as they gain personality and start interacting between different identities.47

This issue of what constitutes a subject or indeed an object is an interesting ontolog-ical quandary. Arguably it is a central though under discussed tenant of much Anglo-American philosophy that we are subjective beings wondering around in an objec-tive world. Yet the phenomenological actuality is that the objective world is a product of subjective consciousness. As such what passes for objective reality is in actuality a series of inter-subjective agreements made with such frequency and consistency that we have forgotten we are making them. This is not to say that the world is not real or does not exist; far from it. It is real. What I’m talking about are the conditions of how we perceive the world and therefore what we can know of it. What I’m getting at is that the idea of objects having subjectivity is as problematic as perceiving our-selves to possess objectivity. Subjectivity and objectivity are both constructs of lan-guage and in fact both subject and object bring each other into being as language through the inter-materiality of their mutual experience of each other. Within this schema the human being may be thought of as a complex material entity. While questions of subjecthood and objecthood are constructs of verbal language, verbal language does not encapsulate nor express the totality of Being. If it did there would be no need for art. So while we can discuss such phenomena as objects having subjecthood we must recognize that this is perhaps not accurate. The reason it is important to consider this is because the language we use to discuss this new blur-ring of relations that Santucci predicts must be as accurate as possible otherwise discourse will be skewed and we may be unable to accurately philosophise the onto-logical conditions that this technology is bringing about. This factor however does not detract from the deeply significant question underpinning Santucci’s remarks: quite simply, what gives humans their humanity and further will the Internet of Things be the undoing of this or its affirmation?

In many ways the key to the above question gaining significance in popular society rests heavily on the question of will the Internet of Things fundamentally enhance

46 http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/physical_health/conditions/odd.shtml site last accessed 26th Sept 2012. 47 Gérald Santucci cited by Rob Van Kranenburg in Ethics Report Venice IoT week, p5.

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human experience. While smart phones and mp3 players and health promises may be viewed as enhancements to human experience, the delivery of such things must be on individuals’ own terms if the technology is to be accepted widely and become common place. To ensure this ethics must be given thorough thought as a philo-sophical discourse and not simply as a subset of Corporate Social Responsibility. Building on this, discussion of the implementation of the Internet of things must ex-pand beyond those whose agency is entwined in profits from its existence. It is in-teresting that politics and legislation seem to be devoid of philosophy proper. It is a sign that markets more than anything else are driving debate and in considering this we end up back at the point of thinking: to create a system of power is to impose a social dynamic. If our system of power is market based, led and driven what does this say about the dynamics of the society we are creating and continually recreating on this basis? On what terms do we conceive of people when we talk about the In-ternet of Things? Are they human beings, consumers, persons (which is a legal cat-egory), organic machines or are they something else as yet undefined?

Here the notion of the post-human is interesting. The recent rise in popularity of the notion of transcending the human is in fact a very old religious preoccupation. Often, as the political philosopher John Gray’s writing signalled, there is much in the mod-ern reasoning of man and his relationship to science that seems like knew foliage growing over the scaffold of ancient ruins: the content may be different but the un-derlying psychological forms giving rise to them remain the same. Thus while we may be forthright in our assertions as to the significance of scientific progress it is also salient to remember and contemplate Grey’s remark that ‘Most people today think they belong to a species that can be master of its own destiny. This is faith, not science’48. In this way, with an eye cast to human history we have to ask ourselves if technological dictatorship is almost inevitable or will mankind break with past form and surpass himself as he strives toward the Übermensch? Perhaps, the answer to these questions lies not in the design of networks and interfaces but in the design of our systems of education and the means by which we seek to empower one and other not only to participate in society, but also to create it and change it. 49

3.4 Implementation: Katharina Liebrand

These mundane, every day moments and acts that are exactly addressed by Justin McKeown and Alicia Benesia, are the deep focus of the BUTLER50 horizontal story

48 John Gray, Straw Dogs, Granta Books, London 2003, p3. 49 Bibliography: Foucault, M Madness and civilization Routledge, London, 1999 Gray, J Straw Dogs, GrantaBooks, 2002 Kaufmann, W (ed) Portable Nietzsche, Penguin Us Ed 1954 Levine, R et al. The Cluetrain Manifesto, Basic books, 2009 Nietzsche, F Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Penguin Books, London, 1969 Virilio, P Pure War. Semiotext(e), Columbia University, New York, 1983 Virilio, P Negative Horizon, Continuum Press, London, 2006 Virilio, P Speed and Politics. Semiotext(e), Columbia University, New York, 1997 50 Three challenges are addressed by the BUTLER project: - CHALLENGE 1: Personalized and Dynamic Demands: How to

handle large and dynamically varying demands for personalized services, goods and information with vast heterogeneity of context? - CHALLENGE 2: Transparency, Privacy and Security in Heterogeneous Systems: how to maintaining trans-parency to end-users while ensuring the privacy of users and security of information in such heterogeneous environ-ments, which in turn calls for universal mechanisms to provide secrecy over communication channels at lower layers such as the network and physical layers? - CHALLENGE 3: Collective Behaviour Modelling to Maximize Efficiency: How to op-timize the impact that ICT systems have in influencing human behaviour towards best practices? http://www.iot-butler.eu/about-butler

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line. Project Butler51 is "the first European project to emphasize pervasiveness, con-text-awareness and security for IoT. Through a consortium of leading Industrial, Corporate R&D and Academic partners with extensive and complementary know-how, BUTLER will integrate current and develop new technologies to form a “bun-dle” of applications, platform features and services that will bring IoT to life”. BUT-LER's deliverable 1.1 claims "there is a pressing need for new social behaviour and cultural codes how to deal with the fact of publicly available private data. Sticking to current social behaviour will creates that much friction in the society itself so it could break apart. A new social behaviour could be based on not needing to understand and control every bit of personal information but become more tolerant to the now public peculiarities of fellow humans." The bottom-up extraction of ethical issues is therefore very important for the ultimate adoption of the use cases as real services.

"People will go on trying to better manage their time, their work and private life and to relax more during their free time. They try to further optimise their working life in order to have more time for other things like family, friends, hobbies, voluntary work, or personal development. The preference for convenient, useful, and easy-to-use products and services will continue to grow. This trend is one of the major forces influencing the BUTLER system, in the way of functionalities needed over all verti-cals, but also in the way BUTLER needs to be presented and how interaction with BUTLER has to work. An easily usable system, that doesn’t force the user to think or adapt, seamless integration into the users daily life and taking into consideration the users most precious resource – time – are of the utmost importance for the suc-cess of BUTLER." (D.1.1)

The key to BUTLER is that it is a system that adjusts to the user and makes life eas-ier to the end user. However, in return it wants a lot of information. Around 70 use cases have been identified just in the course of one day of daily activities. BUTLER demands a lot of data, and generates a lot of data at the same time. New alliances and forms of trust, as well as new third party trusted brokers are needed to bring out the best of balances individual comfort and group solidarity (energy efficiency, re-source allocation).

Katharina Liebrand is in Project BUTLER. She has recently established a group of ethical experts and aims to collect people who come from other different fields of and have a couple common issues to cope with at their work. The question of ethical issues, privacy can set the limitation but also might open new opportunities to estab-lish new functions in the ecosystem of IoT. The arising challenges may be solved by the use of technology as well as legal mechanisms. With the group she wants to build a link between the engineering activities, business activities taking into account the governmental / social aspects.

RvK: The question I have is mainly about what will happen if Butler is successful and the use cases are implemented and working. At what stage in this process of implementation will the actual effect of this connectivity itself begin to play a role In what way, if this happens, does this engender a situation in which 'ethics' comes to

51 Abstract:

• How is the impact on business modeling (constraints / opportunities) in the future? • Speaking of globalisation of markets what mentionable differences do we see internationally? • How does it affect the implementation and exploitation of technologies in the future?

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be including our human relationships with the automated processes that take care of what we perceive as 'seamless' interaction?

KL: "First once the use cases have been implemented to "one", fully integrated (into day to day life) from the user perspective, the relationship between human and ma-chine is going to change, getting a new character. By fully integrated I mean - a kind of invisible, intransparent "thing" to the user. Today we all still have a kind tangible things (smartphone, other devices), where we are able to configure, adjust, enter data proactively, which is in most cases quite deliberate process of interaction be-tween me and my, dedicated to a specific function device: a kind of perceived " what you give what you get relationship "

In the future the things are more "invisible" to me, integrated into things I have al-ways used for specific, once defined purpose (washing, cleaning etc.), in a very sub-tle way. I cannot see what is happen behind the scenes anymore. I cannot touch it. The interaction with the machines is not determined to one physical entity it is somehow everywhere present, a kind of digital partner (ghost, shadow) accompany-ing me through my day.

RVK: Coming back to Butler, what are the critical criteria for hiring a Butler/ Conci-erge?

Trust, you have to trust this person, he knows almost everything about you. This is personified information in his hands. What about all the information I give to the vir-tual Butler (s)? In whose hands I going to entrust with my piece of life? I should know it, before I can trust. How I can get the people trust me? We have just finalized our face2face interviews with the potential end users in (first) Switzerland later in other EU countries, one of the targeted topics was dedicated to ethical issues refer-ring to their attitude, needs, barriers and triggers in the buying process of this kind of " things". Talking about independent living: I wonder how independent and self de-termined are our lives really in the future, IoT scenario? Nowadays the dependency relies on other humans aid, later the humans aid is replaced by machines aid."

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4. The four main solutions:

Based on the input from interviews, literature and solicited points of view:

EDUCATION

DESIGN & FEEDBACK

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY,

NEW BUSINESS & NEW DECISION MAKING MODELS

Co-CREATION

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4.1 Educating people into the mundane: a collaborative exercise.52

Apart from courses on extended media education, or media wisdom, not only ad-dressing media, images and movies, and critical literacy but also the growing con-nectivity, the merging of the analogue and digital and coding skills, one of the most important educational needs lies on building a pedagogy (as well as a didactics) for teaching what it means to live in ‘smart’ homes, streets and cities. As children grow up in this environment, assuming it is ‘normal’ – and it is normal to them – creative ways as explaining relationships of objects for previous generations, are as impera-tive as teaching facts, dates and stories in history.

Therefore the second part of the JRC IPSC session in the Venice workshop was a creative workshop where the audience 'performed' on relationships with mundane objects. Participants were asked to describe an object that the organizers provided, the thoughts and emotions it provoked, including individual stories or events.

Ângela Guimarães Pereira and Paula Curvelo handed out objects like floppy discs, usb sticks, tapes, etc.... to the participants and asked them to write down very intui-tively their ideas and thoughts on the object of their choice. This exercise proved immensely successful for three reasons:

• it broke the normal pattern of talks and Q&A's to such an extent that it al-lowed participants to mix personal memories with their professional expertise;

• it performed not discussed the main point of Alice Benessia's presentation ; that there is a granularity to our relationship with objects that cannot be re-duced to 'pure functionality';

• it showed the 'ephemeral' of technological realities put in front of us as expe-rience.

For Gérald Santucci, this exercise showed us that we are no longer in control of our own 'time', that IoT changes our notions of time as it shows that the dependencies that technology creates are not only historical but that each technology also chang-es the way we experience our daily actions. That is precisely the point where these questions need to be addressed as ethics.

There clearly is a momentum for ethics as an umbrella to discuss what it means to be human, and what it means to be a machine in IoT. This is a very recent devel-opment. It shows that ethics is essential in discussing in collective awareness what we are going to with the technologies that comprise IoT. It may go too far to say that there is an autonomous trajectory, but for sure today the objects that we create are not only stories of how we live, these objects become subjects somewhere along the interaction paths that we have with them. This is shown by the exercise, by Angela Pereira, and Paula Curvelo. Objects are not so far from becoming subjects, as they

52 Abstract: The description should raise awareness of the object’s place in the quotidian, hence telling about the mundane

of the object, including the dependencies and symbolic meanings it carries. The aims of the section are to explore para-doxical elements present in subject-objects and nature-culture relationships. In addition, we would like to question human autonomy in the context of greater (mundane) technology dependency. Lastly we will explore the controversial idea that “things” can have agency, as well as the notion that humans are networks of technologically induced habits.

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gain personality and start interacting between different identities. And if we become the robots of the objects, will they remain the subjects?

This collaborative exercise tapped into the justifications we use to embrace and ap-propriate IoT technologies and it clearly demonstrated that if the positive stories do not get more humane, more rooted in everyday life and practice53, then adoption of IoT by a broad audience might become very difficult.

In the words of Jaromil:

“And of course in this regard free software, as in GNU project and FSF ethical guidelines, is fundamental. That is most of the motivation why we do it since so many years. For the freedom to studying.

Free Software is an answer for public policy that enables grassroots access to knowledge. Locking what is in kids’ pockets is not the thing to do today, really not.”

So down to numbers, we need access to the "SDK", the software development kit: mobile devices of all kinds (ALL, not just phones) should provide an SDK to all citi-zens willing to have it. If, like Apple, the SDK is not free, then we must insure that they can at least buy it, that there are student discounts or programs to have it, last but not least that a credit card is not required to buy it.”

4.2 Design & Feedback

Our key question: What are the values in IoT? Implies that we should be able to an-swer the question:

Why do we need these smart meters at all?

Not only from the point of view of sustainability, or grid operator logic but from a pub-lic involvement perspective as well. We therefore must parse any debate on IoT to the question:

Why do we want a smart society?

What are the key positive points for all stakeholders involved? What are the draw-backs? If we don't then we will have to face and fight acceptance battles with the same pro and con arguments over the smart meter, the smart fridge (safety and effi-ciency), the smart car (mobility and bringing down 420.000 deaths in the EU every

53 Where the Action Is a book by Paul Dourish published by MIT Press in October 2001. Its topic is "embodied interaction", then a novel approach to the design of user interfaces and our interactive experience of computation. These two areas of research -- tangible and social computing -- have been conducted largely as independent research programs. However, I believe that they have a common foundation, and that that foundation is the notion of "embodiment." By embodiment, I don't mean simply physical reality, but rather, the way that physical and social phenomena unfold in real time and real space as a part of the world in which we are situated, right alongside and around us...The idea of disembodied rationality, phenomenolo-gists argue, arises because we think about cognition only in those immediately apparent problem cases where some problem appears in the world that needs to be solved. This ignores 99% of our daily lives, the mundane everyday existence in which we simply go our about business. ...Rather than embedding fixed notions of meaning within technologies, embodied interaction is based on the understanding that users create and communicate meaning through their interaction with the system (and with each other, through the system).... On the basis of this understanding, we can set out a range of design principles that are reflected by systems exploiting embodied interaction. These principles not only reflect important issues for design practice, but they also provide a framework for analysing embodied interaction in existing systems.

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decade), the smart IPv6 lamps (sharing local energy), the smart t-shirt (e-health and the Quantified Self Movement)?

The expertise gathered and displayed by the Ethics and Technology Group in Delft is fuelled by the presence of Industrial Design and a culture of making, will answer that these questions can only be addressed in the beginning of the design and brainstorm process of new IoT applications and services. Jeroen van den Hoven, of ETICA project, Chair of the WG Ethics in the IoT EG, as well as Commission's ex-pert group on Responsible Research and Innovation, emphasizes design to look at ethics as a 'usp', a potential driver of innovation. In this view ethics is a trigger for innovation, not a drawback. He sees ethics as bringing equilibrium in a range of var-iables that caters to the widest possible of variance while following the path of least resistance. It is a pragmatic view that ties in very well with the fact that we are in a real-time world where it becomes harder to distinguish between research and inno-vation, between pilots and launch and learn and between the leading roles of indus-try, governance and end users.

The world of ethics needs to be connected with the methods and tools to use those moral values, the world of engineering. It should therefore make values as explicit as possible. Values are always embedded in any system anywhere. Making them visible and explicit makes them more implementable at the beginning of system en-gineering. This can be described as value sensitive design. This way of working comes with a price though, he states: If we make values explicit, we also should be able to justify the costs of implementation and therefore be able to audit the underly-ing values.

The deeper issues:

• Invisibility – informed consent;

• Informational complexity – dynamic environment – 'us' ignorant about what we are doing;

• Intentionality54: IC A & IC B does not entail IC (A&B) - data mining;

combined with the meshing of data and object networks and exploding data by both, resulting in the emergence of privacy and social justice as key issues, must be front-loaded into the architecture of smart systems, objects, apps and services. In a world of more agility and agency for end users, one does no longer simply implement new services. The Netherlands has shown this with the smart meter failure of adoption and acceptance. Because of this the roll out will be fragmented and build on levels of 'smartness (from 'off' to measuring 6 times a year to measuring and sending data every 15 minutes), something of a very new situation to the energy providers.

Walter Pieters calls the convergence towards an ambient intelligence or connected environment: de-perimeterisation (de-p), the disappearance of boundaries between information entities. This move towards an integral reality across traditional legal, business, social and cultural concepts towards a single environment, could not be foreseen in even the most integrated vision on system theory, that of Luhmann. His

54 Intentionality is the power of minds to be about, to represent, or to stand for, things, properties and states of affairs.

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notions of “strict coupling” -that is designing for perimeters so function creep be-comes minimal and leaks of one domain into the other becomes the focus of securi-ty, is itself disappearing because 'natural' causal insulation – the very agency of us humans to design cause and effect in a hierarchical way is disappearing.

We are beyond ideological debates, van den Hoven says; the outer ends of privacy activists and I-have-nothing-to-hide evangelists will never really meet in a productive way. Our interest should lie with the middle, the grey areas where acceptance is a process, loyalties switch easily, and faith in institutions, banks, corporate culture and national states is low. He claims that the best pragmatic approach is to speak of 'da-ta protection for moral reasons'. An urgent task then seems to be to make a taxon-omy of moral reasons with as many stakeholders as possible.

The smart meter debate seems to present itself then as a model for other services and as a lesson for to take social acceptance not as a given, or a drawback but as a possible co-creator of value.

4.3 Corporate Social Responsibility, New Business & New Decision making models

According to Professor Rolf Weber, of the IoT EG, it might be possible to include ethics as a subset of questions and challenges in Corporate Social Responsibility55. According to the current understanding of corporate social responsibility (CSR) en-terprises already should implement a process to integrate social, environmental, ethical, human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations, particu-larly by identifying, preventing and mitigating possible adverse impacts. According to Rolf Weber ethics is indeed a factor that can be taken into account from a legal point of view. In his opinion it is necessary to enhance the visibility of CSR, to improve trust that is implicit between all stakeholders and enhance market adoption by in-cluding business case modelling from the very beginning, at the earliest moment of innovation. His views seem to give further underpinning to the purpose of the IoT-I study: that is to create an IoT Ethics label and a quick and dirty start-up self-assessment questionnaire on ethics. Topics that such a label could address are:

• resource efficiency

• life cycle assessment

• pollution prevention

• consumer protection

• privacy

• code of good practice

55 Abstract: The EU Commission has submitted a renewed CSR strategy 2011-2014 in late 2011in order to promote a social

dialogue. Part of the Agenda are resource efficiency, life-cycle assessment, pollution prevention, consumer interests and privacy, being topics which have a direct influence on IoT operations. The proposed Agenda for Action encompasses the following issues: (i) Enhancing the visibility of CSR and disseminating good practices, (ii) improving and tracking levels of trust in business, (iii) improving self- and co-regulation processes, (iv) enhancing market reward for CSR, etc.

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• peer review mechanisms

How can these objectives (label and questionnaire) be fulfilled?

• partnerships must be multi-stakeholder CSR platforms (see for example the IoTA Stakeholder Group)

• open debate

• the body awarding the label should be really independent

• with IoT we can do something proactively because IoT means transparency: permanently traceable

• it can accommodate the carrot and the stick approach: carrots = precise measurements/ stick = business risk if no compliance.

Project BUTLER that figured in the issues on implementation56 has a strong CSR link:

"Food scandals, excessive CEO salaries and empty election promises as well as the current decline of the Euro undermine the credibility of industry and politics. Compa-nies and politicians must redefine their marketing and communication strategies on the basis of radical transparency. Corporate Responsibility (CR) describes the com-pany's obligation to be sensitive to the needs of all its stakeholders not just the shareholders. These stakeholders can be citizens, consumers, investors, communi-ties (in the areas where the corporation operates facilities), regulators, academics, and media.

Corporate Responsibility refers to values like trust or sustainability by making them transparent in doing business. It is not a short-term management trend, but a ne-cessity for companies to achieve sustainable success. The sensitivity towards envi-ronment, energy and health issues is growing rapidly...

With its demands of transparency, sustainability and reliability this trend has major impact on the Smart Shopping vertical, where for example information on product features like manufacturing conditions or environmental impact will likely have to be included in product descriptions alongside the more traditional price and content.

Also impacted are the Smart City and Smart Transport domain, where e.g. local au-thorities and transporting companies need to keep resource management, waste reduction and other topics in mind."57

4.4 Co-creation

In all solutions above there is one constant factor: co-creation.

56 Abstract: How is the impact on business modelling (constraints / opportunities) in the future? Speaking of globalisation of

markets what mentionable differences do we see internationally? How does it affect the implementation and exploitation of technologies in the future?

57 Deliverable D 1.1 Requirements and Exploitation Strategy, http://www.iot-butler.eu/news/first-butler-deliverabe-issued.

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Justin McKeown: Perhaps, the answer to these questions lies not in the design of networks and interfaces but in the design of our systems of education and the means by which we seek to empower one and other not only to participate in socie-ty, but also to create it and change it.

Jaromil: The main battle to be done right now I believe, again as I started: access to business. And so it goes with all devices that are connecting humans, machines and humans again: they have a big potential as a value circulation infrastructure and we need to make sure this situation is not mediated and that people with different values can access it and create their own business on it. Open Data means also participations and actually this is the bigger opportunity in IoT: people's participation.

Jeroen van de Hoven: Incentivize – more than educate – emerged as an action point for all stakeholders involved. Suppose we build incentives on the current trend of sharing content, context and resources (cars, houses, homes as hotels, things......) open data initiatives and financial schemes where consumers can trade data for value as in the smart grid)?

According to Gérald Santucci, new and innovative notions of (shared) ownership will be necessary to accommodate real life challenges in these scenarios. Of course, so many things can go wrong. Yet, we - as humans in certain political and economic systems - have always given up data (voluntarily or not) and have always had to realize that there is a trade-off (see for example the discussion on the smart phone as a 'tracker').58

These insights that we gain from the solutions lead to the realisation that the critical encounters with IoT that take place on a daily level should allow co-creation in order to capture value for all stakeholders involved.

Theoretically we can model application and services using the CTR tool described by Cécile Crutzen:

“A critical transformative room is a space between users and their technological de-vices where the preferred interpretation of the actions of the artificial actors can be negotiated, where doubt can occur as a constructive strategy and can be effective in a change of the acting itself; the acting of both the human actors and the artificial actors. In a CTR doubt can lead to actions of inquiring. It is a space between inter-pretation and representation of the offered (ready-made) interactions of the technol-ogy.”

In terms EU methodology, we would take it one step further then the Living Labs methodology and work directly in the neighbourhoods. A scenario could look this this.

An ideal scenario: Internet of Neighbourhoods

Neighbourhoods will be enhanced with as many and as wide a variety of sensors as possible. Workshops with citizens by local media activists and media labs will facili-tate the adoption of this process and will enable the personalisation of these sensors

58 http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/gadgets/article3640409.ece

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through 3D printing tools. The technical challenge will be to build a neighbourhood dashboard that is privacies friendly. The research questions are: how granular can we make the input of the sensors; that is what kind of quality data can we retrieve, and how can this process lead to local decision making procedures in 'light commu-nities59'. The design and interface challenge is about linking low tech with high tech for a growing elderly population. A transversal theme is about 'work'. Can this sys-tem enable a new type of economic growth, namely 'work where we want' (a project by Konstantin Schmoelzer), in a dynamic and flexible way?: 'WWWW' Work When We Want is a service available through mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad, etc.) and web browsers, which combines current existing established payment instru-ments focused on the domestic service sector (e.g. AUT Dienstleistungsscheck, GER Haushaltsscheck, BE Dienstencheques, FR Chèque emploi service universel) and the integration of black market operations into the economic system with the convenience of online payment, an evaluation network to improve the quality of the market, introduction and matching of households with workers and packages to overcome bureaucratic barriers.60

The business model will focus on city furniture and infrastructure: How connected can lampposts, traffic lights, traffic signs, waste bins, roads, sewage systems...be? and what kind of services can be built on top of this? Concretely this entails building neighbourhood servers and public displays.

Gérald Santucci, head of EU unit 'Knowledge Sharing', stressed the importance of the concept ‘from privacy to privacies’ at the Brussels May 2009 Conference on the Internet of Things. What does it mean? We see an individual that has set his or her privacy policies for every daily activity (you basically need to do it only once and it replaces a lot of double-crossed paperwork).

Privacy is thus splintered up into a large set of privacies.

Individuals may set these. These policies correspond with their counterpart in the distributed network of databases. In this way your entire identity is not needed in order to service you on a particular activity. As citizens generate the data, they also decide whom to sell it to in order to enrich it with, or they can decide to that them-selves. The distributed network of databases forms the next layer of smart connec-tions. These are the results, the hints, advice that is played back to you. The first always puts you into contact with real people in your neighbourhood. If that is not possible the second offer goes global immediately and will suggest relations and connections that might be far away physically. A fictional example: In San Sebas-tian, the sensors embedded in the mattress of the inhabitants reveal anonymously to the dashboard that about 7 people sleep really badly.

This information is shown daily on bus stop screens, screens in shops, on TV and – if opted in – on phones. If you sleep badly you can infer you are one of the seven people. You can choose to make yourself known and receive tips and advice for other people that sleep bad and from experts. If you want you can meet the others

59 A term by Duyvendak and Hurenkamp denoting the new societal trend towards communities that have soft boundaries

and less dedicated hard commitments. It addresses that relationships are now both local and virtual through social net-works, couch-surfing 'friends' and remote support networks (for example in rare diseases).

60 Konstantin Schmölzer <konstantin.schmoelzer@gmail.com>

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and talk about it. You can also opt for signing up with a local health program. Or you opt out. The choice is yours.

In such a neighbourhood there is ethics inside.

5. Ethicsinside.eu

We are in a period of transition, and that is where our agency to negotiate lies. It looks like it is quite inevitable that IoT will be a new mediation between people and objects, but does it have to be a dictatorship of technology over people? IoT devel-opments will not turn immediately into a dictatorship; there will be a period of transi-tion. Therefore, it is our responsibility to make that period tangible, visible and actionable. Just 'because we can' should not be the ultima ratio of how (and why) we develop future IoT systems. Every data collection, processing, and storage should be critically valued for what benefits it brings to the human beings and to so-ciety, and the risks it poses. The only way that this will happen is if there is not just awareness among developers and policymakers alike, but a shared understanding of privacy and human values in the digital age. – Gérald Santucci

“The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” [1]

In the philosophy of Aristotle’s there are three domains of knowledge with three cor-responding states of knowing; Theoria, Techné and Praxis. Theoria with its domain of knowledge epistéme, is for the Greek gods, mortals can never reach this state of knowing. But they can strive for it. In Theoria and epistéme we recognize our con-cepts theory and epistemology. In Techné with its domain of knowledge poèsis we find technology and poetry. The original meaning of the word 'technology' was con-cerned with know-how or method, and it is with the Great Exhibition of 1851 that the word becomes synonymous with machines. It is therefore all the more interesting that the domain of knowledge which belonged to Praxis: phronesis has dropped out completely, not only in our language but also in our thought and ways of thinking. Phronesis, that knowledge that any one of us uses daily in the practice of living his everyday existence, is no longer recognized as an important domain of knowledge with a modern linguistic equivalent. In Evolution, Alienation and Gossip, The role of mobile telecommunications in the 21st century, Kate Fox claims:

“The space-age technology of mobile phones has allowed us to return to the more natural and humane communication patterns of pre-industrial society, when we lived in small, stable communities, and enjoyed frequent 'grooming talk' with a tightly inte-grated social network [2].”

According to her about two thirds of our conversation time is entirely devoted to so-cial topics: “discussions of personal relationships and experiences; who is doing what with whom; who is 'in' and who is 'out' and why; how to deal with difficult social situations; the behaviour and relationships of friends, family and celebrities; our own problems with lovers, family, friends, colleagues and neighbours; the minutiae of everyday social life - in a word, gossip”

This underlines the importance of the notion of enaction that Varela outlines in his study Ethical Know-How’, Action, Wisdom and Cognition: “enaction as the ability to

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negotiate embodied, everyday living in a world that is inseparable from our sensory-motor capacities.” [3]

For him this notion is the key to understand ethics in our everyday life. He wonders if the traditional way of setting up a cognitive set of ethical principles and axioms; you should do this, you should not do that…is actually indicative of the way people be-have when confronted with difficult decisions. What do you do, he asks, when you enter your office and you see your colleague tied up in a what appears to be embar-rassing telephone conversation? Would you not be very quiet and try to sneak out of the room unnoticed? Was that not an ethical decision that you made? And were you not immediately convinced that is was an embarrassing situation? Varela then won-ders if we possess a kind of ethical sense. A sense to negotiate encounters on a daily level. It seems then that we have to be educated into seeing our own everyday activities in a different light.

There is an IoT in IoT

IoT-A Stakeholder Boris de Ruyter, Philips Research, wants to address the dynamic capabilities of learning in IoT systems, both by the users and by the environment itself, that happens when situations arise that are not programmed but 'learned'. His main question is: how could you pass on that knowledge of different generations - this 'culture' -to other systems. What is the abstract level on which this kind of learn-ing can take place? Where, for example, in IoT-A would such a dynamic model be? Such a kind of educating the environment would not only benefit the user greatly but also an ecosystem of companies that could share such an environment and its standards.

It is indeed our job to both look into the issues as they are now, and to project a full IoT environment into a relatively near future (acceleration in combinatorial innova-tion) and work back from that. In this more proactive framework we can predict the emergence of new entities and actors.

If we picture governance, industry and end users each as entities with a specific set of qualities, then these new entities will consist of some qualities of end users (agili-ty, real time), some qualities of governance (distributed processes of standardisation among super users) and some qualities of industry (new business models fostered by leasing not owning as a dominant user model in IoT).

One of these new entities that emerged during the day was that of the private grid operator. Individual homeowners can potentially make money by selling energy at the right time. How will such an actor behave him or herself? No one knows. Florent Frederix commented that one thing is certain for the grid-operators people are no longer simple 'connections' but real clients – prosumers. They have to learn how to deal with them. They are learning fast. Their trajectory can be an important example for other services to follow.

The IoT in IoT is the acceleration of added connectivity that will behave in ways we can hardly predict.

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6. Conclusion

There URL of the website www.ethicsinside.eu has different sections outlining the issues and solutions as well as fronting an ‘ideal’ scenario as the candidate for the ethics label. Startups can apply for this label through a contact page. This will spark debate among the lead users. Lead users “are users whose present strong needs will become general in a marketplace months or years in the future. Since lead users are familiar with conditions which lie in the future for most others, they can serve as a need-forecasting laboratory for marketing61 research.6263

Ethicsinside.eu was the input for three workshops in order to get first feedback.

In Workshop 3: Transmedia, Brussels, Alexandros Efstathiadis wrote ‘Internet of Things: What is really at stake64? tackling the issue of ‘inevitability’:65

Workshop 4: The 4th Annual Internet of Things Europe 2012 Working Group Ethics (RvK and Maurizio Salvi) started with the assumption that although the word 'ethics' itself is not foregrounded, there is a consistent ethical framework behind Horizon 2020 and EU public and R&D policy. Maurizio Salvi, political advisor of Bar-roso, stressed the importance that he attaches to a consistent ethics agenda and a value driven governance of industry and emergent convergences like IoT. In this respect there is a need for an interdisciplinary analysis on action points such as in-formed consent, autonomy and individuality identity. Internet of Things is seen as an important part of this process of ethical embedding as it blurs the difference between what can be addressed in an analogue (visible) and digital (invisible) way. This is a 63 Revised paper published as: von Hippel, Eric (1986) "Lead Users: A Source of Novel Product Concepts," Management Science 32, no. 7 (July):791-805.Lead Users: An Important Source of Novel Product Concepts, Eric von Hippel, Sloan School of Management Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 64 A lot of energy has been consumed on debating disorienting issues concerning the Internet of Things. Countless articles, videos, etc have been discussing whether it is right or wrong, good or evil. At the same time activist groups put great amounts of effort in order to ensure that the upcoming IoT will be an open and transparent environment. However, the key question that everyone seems to be forgetting is who actually holds the power to decide whether IoT will become a reality or not in the first place? A small survey reveals that the main sponsors and advocates of IoT are national and international institutions in close collabo-ration with private multinational companies. To put it more clearly, the driver of this overambitious plan to transform everyday life is, once again, an elite that stands at the top of the social hierarchical pyramid. This elite, the big capital no matter how inhomogeneous it is and despite its internal conflicts, has the power, the organisation and the means to decide and realize what the next step in human history is going to be according to its interests. In other words, this ruling class is the sole owner of historical time. Nevertheless, the capitalist system is at the doorstep of a major crisis, perhaps the biggest it has ever faced. Yet, it has been postponing this crisis ever since the 70s. Back then, the main capitalist players turned to speculation and the creation of ficti-tious capital in order to deal with the limits the Fordist production model had reached and the subsequent over-accumulation of stagnant capital. The opening to new markets like East Europe, China, etc during the 90s, gave a couple of more decades of life to the system. Nowadays, it becomes evident that all of these plans ( IoT, but also “green” capitalism, austerity, etc) are actually part of a greater context of efforts of the big capitalist players to postpone once more the crisis and retain their role in the pyramid despite their enormous debt, huge fiscal bubbles about to burst, lack of new markets, and most importantly the delegitimisation of their grand narratives such as perpetual economic growth, infinite innovation and the pursuit of happiness through production and consumption. Thus, an urgent need emerges in this transitional era to reconsider who is in charge of the decision-making. Are we, all of us who don’t belong to this elite going to allow to a small minority to make plans and take decisions for us, without us according to specific interests and motives? Or are we going to opt for new ways of organization and distribution of power where through antihierarchical and horizontal processes we can decide collectively on creating step by step a world according to our needs and desires. Only then, as the emancipated owners of the irreversible time of the living64 we can really start discussing if we want to make the step towards an Internet of Things. 65 This text led to a discussion on the Internet of Things Linkedin Group on the notion of inevitablity. See: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=2206279&trk=myg_ugrp_ovr

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new dimension and thus ethicsinside.eu can be relevant in the discussion on the autonomy of man and technology.

The 5th and final workshop in Bled, as part of the Working Group Societal of the IoT Forum, November 28 2012 has addressed Ethics in details on the basis of this deliverable and ethicsinside.eu

Co- Chair Mirko Presser summarizes an action plan to take both topics further into the next IoT-forum. The ethicsinside.eu website is the anchor of this activity and serves as a starting point. For the next IoT-forum, the action plan is on the involve-ment of the Big/Industry and Small/SME and hacklabs in the discussion about bring-ing ethical views to product design. To this degree, the work group needs to expand on the participants in terms of entrepreneurs. Larger companies and SMEs as well as academia and research institutions are well represented in the discussion al-ready. An expansion into other disciplines such as philosophy or social sciences can also be improved. As another aspect the target is on developing a set of easy to use methodologies and tools for assessing ethics in IoT product and solution designs. Examples of a Silicon Valley company Palantir’s task force were given as well as some developments alongside Company Social Responsibility (CSR) reporting.

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i Co-written with Rob van Kranenburg and Marcus Kirsch for the Annual Yearbook NMI 2012 ii Co-written with Rob van Kranenburg for Harvard Business Review , 2012 iii This text was specifically written for ethicsinside.