Transparency in the Consumer Internet-of-Things
Smart devices, such as speakers with voice assistants, home security systems, fitness trackers and other wearables increasingly feature in everyday life. These so-called consumer Internet of Things (IoT) products can generate and collect vast amounts of data about ourselves, our actions and our behaviours; though often there is little known about this data and how it is used. Towards this, we explored the potential for transparency mechanisms for building an understanding of the data processing practices of IoT product vendors.
“Our findings reveal that consumer IoT products can involve substantial flows of data. However, the generally poor data rights practices of vendors hinder detailed understanding of what data is being shared, with whom, and why”
Specifically, we obtained 43 IoT products and set up a monitoring infrastructure to capture data flows from the products over the Internet as they were being used. We analysed the volumes, frequencies, and destinations of these data flows, and then used our data rights to probe the vendors what data was collected, why, with whom it is shared, and so on.
We found that IoT vendors generally provide little transparency and are often not forthcoming about what happens with people’s data. Given that consumer IoT devices will likely be used in personal and intimate settings, such as in our homes or worn on our bodies, this opacity in data processing practices raises real concerns.
Publications
Hudig, A.I, Mandalari, A.M., Norval, C., Haddadi, H., Binns, R., and Singh, J. (2025). Rights Out of Sight: Data Practices and Transparency Gaps in Smart Consumer IoT Ecosystems. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2260–2273. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715275.3732154.
Hudig, A.I., Norval, C. & Singh, J. (2023). Data rights in the consumer Internet of Things, International Conference on AI and the Digital Economy (CADE 2023), Hybrid Conference, Venice, Italy, pp. 25-30, doi: 10.1049/icp.2023.2560.
Hudig, A.I., Norval, C. & Singh, J. (2023). Transparency in the Consumer Internet of Things: Data Rights and Data Flows [Research Report]. This project was funded by a grant from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO). The report can be found here: https://iot-transparency.org.
Talks
Hudig, A.I. (2023, June). Transparency in the Consumer Internet of Things [seminar]. Seminar Series on Challenges for a Cyber-Physical World. Institute for Cyber Security, University of New South Wales. Available at: https://allenshub.unsw.edu.au/events/transparency-consumer-internet-things.
Hudig, A.I. (2023, April). What happens with our data in the Internet of Things? [presentation] Oxbridge Women in Computer Science Conference 2023.