Some unusual witnesses helped condemn Alex Murdough for his wife’s murders, Maggie, and his son, Paul.
The first was Bubba, Maggie’s Yellow Retriever Labrador. Prosecutors used a Bubba recording to locate Alex at the scene of the murders. Given Alex’s presence on the crime scene, other witnesses revealed their movements, tracked their speed and explained what he had in their hands. Those other witnesses were a Chevy Suburban 2021 and the cell phones of Maggie, Paul and Alex, who provided data. All of them are part of the Internet of Things, also known as IoT.
The privacy implications of the devices connected to the Internet are not usually the most important consideration when resolving a case of murder. But outside the criminal prosecution, they affect the privacy of people in ways that should make everyone stop.
THE INTERNET OF THINGS
The Internet of things includes any object or device that sends and receives data automatically through the Internet. When you use your phone to send messages to someone or social networks to publish something, the exchange is deliberate. But the automatic nature of the connected devices leaves humans outside the circuit. The data of these devices can reveal a lot about the people who interact with them, and on other people around the devices.
As a law assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, I have seen how new types of connected devices have entered the market. New devices mean new ways to collect data on people.
Connected devices collect information from different contexts. Take your refrigerator. Being an IoT device, your refrigerator did not generate data on your kitchen, your food or the frequency with which you looked inside. His relationship with the fridge was effectively private. Only you knew of that midnight sandwich or if you looked with your eyes the lunch of a co -worker.
Now, smart refrigerators can respond to voice commands, show images of the items in their refrigerator, track who opens it, suggest recipes, generate shopping lists and even communicate with their car to inform you that the milk has expired. All these functions require continuous data flows.
Device data and privacy
Connected devices generate a large amount of data in contexts that have normally produced few data so that these situations are “legible” for those who can access the data.
In the past, if you wanted to control your heart rate, blood oxygenation, sleep patterns and stress levels, you may have submitted to a hospital test battery. A team specialized in a controlled environment would have measured your body and would have made these parts of you visible for highly trained and licensed professionals. But now, devices such as Oura Ring trace and analyze all that information continuously, in non -sanitary contexts.
Even if you do not care to share data with an Internet company of things, there are privacy risks when using a device like this. In the context of medical care, a series of rules applied by several groups ensure that the connected equipment and data they generate have adequate cybersecurity protections. Out of that context, the connected devices that perform similar functions do not have to meet the same cybersecurity standards.
The US Cyber Trust Mark program, administered by the Federal Communications Commission, is developing cybersecurity standards for Internet devices of things. But the program is voluntary. In some states, such as Washington, state laws establish standards to protect health data from connected devices. But these laws do not cover all the data of all devices in all contexts. This makes the devices and data that generate especially vulnerable to unwanted access by computer pirates.
Its inability to control who sees the data that collects connected devices is another risk for privacy. You can give advertisers information about potential customers. In the absence of a mandatory exclusion, each device provider can decide what to do with customer data. Amazon, for example, recently eliminated the “Do not send voice recordings” option from the privacy settings of its popular smart speaker, Alexa.
Some providers of connected devices participate in the data markets, selling their data to the best bidder. Sometimes those buyers include government agencies. Therefore, instead of needing a court order to track your whereabouts or know the activity in your home, you can buy or access the internet records of things.
A connected device can also compromise the privacy of someone who is simply close.
Connected cars
The cars have joined the ranks of the Internet of things. The Chevy Suburban 2021 that helped condemn Alex Murdough simply tracked information about the vehicle. This included the speed of the vehicle, the rotation radius of the steering wheel and the time marks.
Most modern vehicles also incorporate data from external sources. GPS and infotainment data systems that connect to cell phones also track vehicle movements. All these data can also be used to track the whereabouts and behavior of drivers and other people in vehicles.
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And as vehicles become increasingly automated, they need to make driving decisions in increasingly complex situations. To make safe driving decisions, they need data on the world around them. They need to know the size, speed and behavior of all nearby vehicles on the road, moment by moment. They need to instantly identify the best way to prevent a pedestrian, cyclist or another object from entering the road.
If you and I drive in separate cars on the same road, it means that my car is collecting information about you. And if my vehicle is connected, then the data on you are shared with other cars and car companies. In other words, if a Tesla had been present in the Murdough murders scene, its external cameras could have captured images. Bubba’s testimony may not have been necessary.
Collection of overflow data
Internet devices of things generate data from similar situations in a highly structured way. Therefore, what data compilers learn about me through my connected device can also provide information about another person in a similar situation.
Take smart meters who share information with the water company every 15 minutes. Imagine a subdivision with a narrow range of sizes of houses and courtyards. Water consumption must be relatively comparable to each home. The data of even a couple of houses can give a good idea what the use of water should be for everyone in the neighborhood. Without really collecting data from each house, the data of the connected devices reveal potentially private information about people in similar situations.
IoT devices data can also feed information about people who never use or come into contact with these devices. The aggregate data of the Oura rings, for example, could contribute to the decisions that a health insurer takes on you.
Connected devices are also changing. In addition to collecting data on the person who uses the device, an increasing number of sensors collects information about the surrounding environment.
Some of my research have examined what privacy means for people observed by vehicle sensor systems, such as radar, lidar and sound. These technologies capture potentially revealing information about people and their properties. Even the most complete privacy laws of the United States offer people few resources for the impact on their privacy.
Civil drones are able to collect data on other people. But people observed by drones would have difficulty learning that there are data on them and even more to control how that information could be used.
Meanwhile, artificial intelligence systems are expanding the ways in which internet data of things can affect other people’s privacy by automating the training process of IoT systems. The NVIDIA chips manufacturer has created a digital environment, or model, where people can load the data of their connected devices. This environment can help train IoT devices to “predict the results of device interactions with other people,” according to NVIDIA.
Models such as this facilitate that the IA devices that are not your property collect data or reach conclusions about you. In other words, IoT data processed by AI can make inferences about you, which makes it readable for the AI system even before interacting with an IoT device.
Waiting
The Internet devices of things and the data they generate have come to stay. As the world becomes increasingly automated, I think it is important to be more aware of the way connected devices may be affecting people’s privacy.
The story of how vehicles were combined with cell data in the Murdaugh trial is a good example. At the beginning of the trial, prosecutors were ready to show “telephone call records and text messages, registered steps, applications that request information, GPS locations, changes when the phone passed the vertical vertical mode in the horizontal horizontal mode and vice versa, and -clave in the case of the Prosecutor’s Office- when the camera was activated.”
But that was probably not enough to deserve a conviction. During the trial, GM called and said something like “Oh, wait, we find something,” according to the Prosecutor’s Office. These vehicle data, combined with cell phone data, told a story that Alex Murdaugh could not deny.
There are at least two lessons in this story. First, not even GM realized all the data that had been collected in its vehicles. It is important to be aware of the amount of information collected by IoT devices. Second, the combination of data from different IoT devices revealed incontestable details of Alex Murdaugh’s activities. Outside the criminal courts, the combination of multiple IoT devices can have a deep effect on the privacy of people.
If the privacy of people’s data is important, how do we address this reality? One way to potentially protect people’s privacy is to ensure that the people and communities observed by connected devices have direct voice in the data that collect the devices and how the data is used.
*David Sella-Villa is a law assistant professor at the University of South Carolina.
This article was originally published in The Conversation/Reuters
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