Designing Connected Products

Chapter 11. Responsible IoT Design

BY ANN LIGHT AND CLAIRE ROWLAND^[150]

This chapter looks at the factors that make products trustworthy and safe to use. Connecting up products and services brings new challenges for security, privacy, social engineering, and the environment. We argue that we should consider how our designs impact on others’ lives, and take this as seriously as we take the need for profit and competitive advantage.

This chapter introduces:

• The challenges of securing the Internet of Things (see Security)

• The challenges of protecting users’ privacy (see Privacy)

• The risk that designing technology involves social engineering (see Social Engineering)

• The environmental impact of IoT (see Mitigating the dangers of social engineering?)

This chapter addresses the following issues:

• Why embedded devices are especially at risk from network security threats (see Why IoT Security is a Big Challenge)

• What design requirements for usable IoT security might look like (see Design Requirements for Usable IoT Security)

• How data that seems innocuous can be aggregated to create a privacy breach (see Aggregation)

• What good data protection for IoT might look like (see Patterns of behavior)

• How technology that tries to be “smart” can end up reinforcing social stereotypes (see Social Engineering)

• Understanding the environmental impact of a connected device across its entire lifecycle (see What’s the Environmental Impact of an IoT Product?)

Security

Computer security is the degree to which a system can protect ...