Peter A Clarke

The Fairfax press has run a legitimate, if breathless, report on fridges having the potential to turned into listening devices in Queensland police say fridges could be turned into listening devices.  The context of the story is about parliamentary inquiry into surveillance powers.  It touches on two neglected but potent developments; the new modes of surveillance, in this case using connected devices, and the expansion of the internet of things, with the attendant weakness with data security and privacy protections.  It is a timely reminder of how poorly the law and its regulators have responded to this growing issue.

Hackers having the ability to hack into interconnected devices is nothing new.  Wired spectacularly demonstrated that by hacking into a jeep’s computer and stopping it on a highway in 2015.  Baby monitors, with factory setting privacy settings, have been hacked,  on multiple occasions, with relative ease.   The Federal Bureau of Investigation has issued a Public Service Announcement, Internet-Connected Toys Could Present Privacy and Contact Concerns for Children, about the vulnerability of internet connected toys to be hacked. The Federal Trade Commission has focused on “connected cars” and the obvious privacy and data security issues arising from the increasing volume of data that are being collected from cars and their occupants.  It has gone further and offered a $25,000 to an app developer who built an app, to use the words of the Consumerist,  designed to make your stuff’s security suck less.

It is difficult to underestimate the impact of connectivity with the internet of things. The Pew Research Center issued a very comprehensive report The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What Are the Implications? which covers both the huge benefits but also the significant risks with a greatly interconnected economy.

The researchers found there were 7 major themes arising from their research of the internet of things:

Notwithstanding these themes the law still applies to the internet of things which means compliance with the Privacy Act.