Monday Witness: It's Time to Reconize a Civil Right Not to be Connected

The second is that those devices will have wholly inadequate security, if they have any security at all. Even with strong defenses, there is the likelihood that governmental agencies will gain covert access to IoT devices anyway.

What this says to me is that we need a law that guarantees consumers the right to buy versions of products that are not wirelessly enabled at all.

If that sounds like an over-reaction, consider the poinyd made in a recent ZDNet story by Danny Palmer, titled Internet of Things security: What happens when every device is smart and you don't even know it? That article reads in part as follows:

"The price of turning a dumb device into a smart device will be 10 cents," says Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure. However, it's unlikely that consumer [sic] will be the one who gains the biggest benefits from every device their homes collecting data; it's those who build them who will reap the greatest rewards -- alongside government surveillance services.

"It's going to be so cheap that vendors will put the chip in any device, even if the benefits are only very small. But those benefits won't be benefits to you, the consumer, they'll be benefits for the manufacturers because they want to collect analytics,"…

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