6 Internet of Things Gaslighting and the Smart Home
6 Internet of Things Gaslighting and the Smart Home
Learners consider the features of a “Smart Home” and explore a worst-case scenario, namely, that a smart home might be used in a gaslighting attack. Gaslighting is a term, first introduced in 1969 by British psychiatrists, to refer to situations where one person seeks to induce mental illness in another person by subtle and subversive changes to the target’s environment — for example, the lighting in one’s home. Learners are positioned to design policy and technical solutions.
Introduction
Please Note: This scenario contains potentially distressing content related to domestic abuse.
The “Internet of Things” is poised to shape societies for years to come. The vision is for physical objects, of all kinds in all places, to dynamically and intelligently respond to human needs and circumstances. Manufacturers and tech optimists promise more efficiency and happiness. The New York Times puts it this way:
Cars, door locks, contact lenses, clothes, toasters, refrigerators, industrial robots, fish tanks, sex toys, light bulbs, toothbrushes, motorcycle helmets — these and other everyday objects are all on the menu for getting “smart.” Hundreds of small start-ups are taking part in this trend — known by the marketing catchphrase “the internet of things” — but like everything else in tech, the movement is led by giants, among them Amazon, Apple and Samsung.
The constellation of technologies that make up the Internet of Things will, in all likelihood, create benefits and lead to new social and economic opportunities. On the other hand, just as likely, the Internet of Things will also enable inappropriate or unsafe behaviors, create challenges and unintended consequences, and lead to harms.
According to Melvin Kranzberg, a philosopher of technology, any “technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” Accordingly, the Internet of Things will surely be empowering and problematic at the same time, a double-edged sword. How empowering? How problematic? And, for whom? While somewhat difficult to predict, the social and economic impacts of this foundational technology, experienced directly and as ripple effects, are likely to be very substantial. At least the following values are at stake: privacy, security, control, and freedom.
Leading technologists, Francine Berman and Vinton Cerf, write: “The difference between an IoT [Internet of Things] that enhances society and one that diminishes it will be determined by our ability to create an effective model for IoT governance” (Berman & Cerf, 2017). One approach for discovering what a model of governance needs to address is to explore worse-case scenarios—that is, what might go wrong and what might be done so that big problems are less likely to occur.
Stepping back, the Internet of Things can be viewed as a network of objects and devices that sense, compute, exchange information, and respond. With some engineering, anything that has an on-off switch might plaus