The Internet of Things: Legal Woes for CIOs | CIO

Stephanie Overby over at CIOs  has an interesting piece today on the legal pitfalls that Internet of Things adoption may hold for chief information officers (CIOs).

Connected Internet of Things devices could pose legal risks to companies, especially around customer data collection and storage.
Connected Internet of Things devices could pose legal risks to companies, especially around customer data collection and storage.

While the prospect of more, intelligent devices holds great promise for organizations across the economy, Overby notes that there are also risks – especially when it comes to the wholesale harvesting of customer data.

“Many of the legal issues are not well understood even by sophisticated privacy practitioners,” the article quotes Christopher Wolf, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells saying. “In the world of sensors rather than computer screens, the legal issues are challenging.”

CIOs are advised to consider “self-regulating” around issues like privacy, security and consent, to stay on the right side of the evolving law.

CIOs should scrutinize every decision to collect user information and ask whether the benefits to collecting the data outweigh the potential costs, especially in the event of a data breach.

CIOs should also think about when and how they will ask individuals to provide meaningful consent for the use of this data, including disclosures of how and when that data may be used. That can be challenging in the context of IoT devices, which often lack interfaces that make it easy to present dense amounts of information like end user agreements and privacy disclosures, the article notes.

Read more via The Internet of Things Brings Legal Gotchas to CIOs | CIO.

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