Fog and Edge Computing

16 Legal Aspects of Operating IoT Applications in the Fog

G. Gultekin Varkonyi Sz. Varadi and Attila Kertesz

16.1 Introduction

As a growing number of communicating devices join the Internet, we will soon face a foggy and cloudy world of interconnected smart devices. Cloud systems [1] have already started to dominate the Internet; with the appearance of the Internet of Things (IoT) area [2] IoT cloud systems are formed that still needs a significant amount of research. IoT is a rapidly emerging concept where sensors, actuators, and smart devices are often connected to and managed by cloud systems. IoT environments may generate a huge amount of data to be processed in the cloud. To reduce service latency and to improve service quality, the paradigm of fog computing [5] has been introduced, where the data can be kept and processed closed to the user.

The European Commission recently implemented comprehensive European data protection rules, where the main objectives are: (i) to modernize the legal system of the European Union (EU) for the protection of personal data to respond to the use of new technologies; (ii) to strengthen users' influence on their personal data and to reduce administrative formalities; (iii) and to improve the clarity and coherence of the EU rules for personal data protection. To achieve these goals, the Commission created the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) [3], a regulation that sets out a general EU framework for data protection and replaced ...