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ITU Report On Internet Of Things: Great Potential For Development But Privacy, Interoperability Concerns

19/01/2016 by Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch 3 Comments

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Connected devices talking to each other and to humans could solve major global challenges and be a vector for global development, according to a new report by the UN International Telecommunication Union and Cisco Systems. However, issues remain, such as strategies to protect privacy, and interoperability between devices and systems.

The ITU today released its report [pdf] “Harnessing the Internet of Things for Global Development,” produced in collaboration with Cisco Systems. The report looks at the current use of the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies and their potential to solve some pressing issues in developing countries, such as crop and livestock management, detection and prevention of major natural disasters, and the improvement of health and wellbeing through greater efficiency and improved care in existing healthcare settings.

According to the report, there are a number of definitions of the IoT. The ITU defines it as “a global infrastructure for the information society, enabling advanced services by interconnecting (physical and virtual) things based on existing and evolving interoperable information and communication technologies.”

The IoT can be used in an array of applications, such as monitoring vaccine delivery and storage in real-time through connected thermometers, or cameras and sensors in smartphones and tablets enabling health workers to provide remote diagnosis.

The report also mentions text analysis of social media data as having the potential to reflect growing tensions in a particular region, which could be used to forecast potential outbreaks of violence.

However, significant challenges persist, according to the report, in particular the fact that “the same infrastructure that enables people to create, store and share information may also jeopardize their privacy and security.”

“These same techniques can be used for large-scale and targeted surveillance,” it said.

The IoT also has regulatory implications, including licensing, standards, competition, and security and privacy, the report says. Separately, “broader governance issues may impede the adoption of the IoT, such as in the case of the slow adoption of connected thermometers to protect the vaccine cold chain due to challenges in certification approval for new technologies in the World Health Organization’s Pre-Qualified Systems (PQS).”

The report provides a number of recommendations, in particular to promote standards that facilitate interoperability across the IoT ecosystem, foster investment, and competition.

And the report advises that strategies protecting privacy “must take a range of risks into account from a variety of different sources as well as adapt to local regulations.”

 

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Related

Catherine Saez may be reached at csaez@ip-watch.ch.

Creative Commons License"ITU Report On Internet Of Things: Great Potential For Development But Privacy, Interoperability Concerns" by Intellectual Property Watch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Filed Under: IP Policies, Language, Themes, Venues, Access to Knowledge/ Education, Copyright Policy, Development, English, ITU/ICANN, Information and Communications Technology/ Broadcasting, Trademarks/Geographical Indications/Domains

Trackbacks

  1. New ITU, Cisco Report Looks at the Potential of the Internet of Things | LJ INFOdocket says:
    19/01/2016 at 5:33 pm

    […] ITU Report On Internet Of Things: Great Potential For Development But Privacy, Interoperability Conc… […]

    Reply
  2. L’internet des objets nous surveille aussi – Framablog says:
    20/01/2016 at 8:50 am

    […] (2) Voici un article très récent sur les espoirs et les craintes qu’on peut éprouver : « Rapport de l’UIT sur Internet des objets : un grand potentiel de le développement mais des risques pour la confidentialité et l’interopérabilité » (source) […]

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  3. Atlanta teams up with AT&T to plan the internet takeover - The Signal says:
    28/01/2016 at 6:12 pm

    […] innovations are inspired by the up-and-coming Internet of Things (IoT), an effort to enable all technological devices to communicate with each other through the […]

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