Ethical Design in the Internet of Things

Even though public awareness about privacy risks in the Internet is increasing, in the evolution of Internet to the Internet of Things (IoT) these risks are likely to become more relevant due to the large amount of data collected and processed by the "Things". The business drivers for exploring ways to monetize such data are one of the challenges identified in this paper for the protection of Privacy in IoT. Beyond the protection of privacy, this paper highlights the need for new approaches, which grant a more active role to the users of IoT and which address other potential issues such as the Digital Divide or safety risks. Key in ethical design is transparency of technology and services in how it handles data, as well as choice for the user. This paper presents a new approach for users' interaction with IoT, which is based on the concept of Ethical Design implemented through a policy-based framework. In the proposed framework, users are provided with wider controls over personal data or IoT services by selecting specific sets of policies, which can be tailored according to users' capabilities and to the contexts where they operate. We also describe deployment aspects of the framework with the identification of the main stakeholders and the processes that should be put in place.