Why Marketers Must Create Privacy Practices For The IoT Economy

Why marketers must create privacy practices for the IoT economy.

- Patrick Kulp

In his day job, Peter Bihr is a strategic consultant who provides big tech companies and the occasional government with policy work, research and product advice around Internet of Things (IoT) technology and other emerging platforms.

But earlier this year, Bihr set out to solve one of the many problems that marketers face when using the IoT to advertise: Consumers had no idea which devices they could trust to securely and transparently handle their personal data. With the support of a German nonprofit called ThingsCon and a research fellowship from Mozilla, Bihr created a heptagonal Trustable Tech Mark awarded based on consistent criteria that would indicate to consumers whether the companies behind their smart speakers or connected appliances should be considered reliable stewards of sometimes-intimate information about their lives. The right to advertise based on your signals and behaviors is a tight thread to needle.

“As a consumer, it’s basically impossible to find out which devices are OK—you can only go by brand name essentially,” Bihr said. “I’m not going to lie; I wish bigger organizations had tackled that a long time ago. But they didn’t, so here we are.”