Welcome to the Internet of Things. Please check your privacy at the door.

It knows when you are sleeping and when you are awake. It knows when you’re home and when you’re away. It knows how how fast you drive, how many steps you took yesterday, and how hard your heart is working right now.

It’s the Internet of Things (IoT), and it is terrible at keeping secrets.

If the Web resembles the wild west when it comes to personal privacy, then the IoT is a jungle where only the fearless survive. While the privacy threats are similar, the stakes are much higher. Connected devices are collecting vast amounts of deeply personal information from our homes, our cars, and our bodies — far more than any Web site possibly could. The kind of data that’s being collected and what happens to it is governed almost entirely by privacy policies that virtually no one reads and few truly understand. Many IoT devices and apps have no privacy policy at all. And IoT security at this point in time is tissue thin, leaving your personal data at risk from external attack.

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