The single biggest problem with IoT devices is the black box, vendor-specific cloud platform nature. This causes privacy issues galore as well as requiring every manufacturer to reinvent the wheel to secure their devices, while also making huge quantities of ewaste when Random Manufacturer #484 goes out of business, taking their cloud with them.
How about instead, mandating that all IoT devices need to comply with an open standard? Customers would be free to connect their device to Siri or Alexa if they wanted, but by default the device just works with an open standard that you can control fully, hosted at home if desired.
It would also remove the cloud security onus from the manufacturer—they would fund the standards org, which would be responsible for the security of the interface.
We already have this concept for electricity, phones, networking. You don’t buy a “MA Bell” phone anymore or an “Edison-compatible” fan.
How about instead, mandating that all IoT devices need to comply with an open standard? Customers would be free to connect their device to Siri or Alexa if they wanted, but by default the device just works with an open standard that you can control fully, hosted at home if desired.
It would also remove the cloud security onus from the manufacturer—they would fund the standards org, which would be responsible for the security of the interface.
We already have this concept for electricity, phones, networking. You don’t buy a “MA Bell” phone anymore or an “Edison-compatible” fan.