IoH – Internet of Humans

IoH – Internet of Humans

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

By Avi Yariv

A few weeks ago I heard a presentation of CEO of a leading Israeli company, developing technologies for IoT – the new era of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology. The age of IoT provides us with one standard to inter-connect e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g. Not to be confused, IoT did not invent connectivity and interoperability – but the lack of a leading unified standard, had fragmented the technology world to different technologies, different platforms, different formats, different interfaces, countries and geographical regions, mega technology companies, and more.

The internet, who took absolute control over our lives, became the ad-hoc standard for connectivity and the actual “language” of technology for inter-connecting and inter-operability, hence it was straight forward that IoT will be based on the same standard – including all the internet’s down faults like security and more.

This revolution is more of an evolution, and not all devices will support the new standard tomorrow morning, so many agile companies (like Intel) have developed a “gateway” – a device that connects the old world to the new shiny world – on one side to the legacy equipment we already bought, paid for and using – and the other side connect to the new IoT internet cloud and beyond.

The CEO I heard excluded the Smartphones of his presentation, as not being a part of IoT revolution. I guess he views Smartphones as an extension of the PCs and the original internet network.

I completely disagree.

Smartphones are devices that from one side are connected to the older protocol and system (“us” – humans) and from the other side to the internet cloud – the perfect Gateway. This gateway gives us access to the entire world, capability to interact with devices and other humans almost regardless of language and geographical location.

This Internet of Humans (IoH) carries out a lot of similar risks as the “traditional” IoT.  We are exposed to surveillance and spying on us (commercial or security), we are exposed to malicious influencing material (Brain-washing content) and manipulations.

The worst problem with the Smartphone is – we cannot go back, we cannot manage without them!!! So we are absolutely exposed to manipulation by mega-players such as countries, Smartphone providers, telco companies, Apps developers and others.

Examples: Waze will determine the route we take, LinkedIn will recommend specific contacts and monitors our careers and capabilities, Google will expose us to specific Ads and search results, WhatsApp will inform if someone is available and saw our message, Cloud storage providers have full access to our data, advertising companies are “surprisingly” aware to our location in real-time.

The only way to deal with this new Trend of IoH is accepting the fact we are manipulated on a day-to-day basis – and remembering to be doubtful at all time. And remember to pray these capabilities don’t fall into the wrong hands.