ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to map the main consumer issues in the IoT and will focus on how these are enabled by the fact that IoT companies exploit gaps, inadequacies, and obsolescence of existing laws to put in place dubious practices of private ordering. The IoT can bring tremendous benefits to consumers. Advantages in the adoption of the IoT include the provision of new and more innovative products, services, and functionalities; more decentralised and distributed services; automating repetitive tasks; cost saving; more environmental-friendly practices; tailored offers; and remotely monitored and life-long safety. At the same time, the IoT constitutes an unprecedented threat to consumer’s privacy, autonomy, self-determination, and safety. This will be illustrated by referring to the consumer issues of surveillance capitalism, ‘death of ownership,’ private ordering ‘by bricking,’ vulnerability of Things, IoT commerce, the Internet of Personalised Things, and contractual quagmire. The contractual quagmire exemplifies the instrumental use of terms and conditions, privacy policies, end user licence agreements, etc. (collectively ‘legals’) to control the Thing and ultimately its user; it is a core component of the private ordering that includes other legal, factual, and technical forms of control. This private ordering is the direct or indirect cause of virtually all the consumer issues considered in this book, which justifies the empirical qualitative analysis of IoT contracts presented in this chapter. Alongside the ‘core’ legals, other contractual documents are presented and, with them, the factors that lead to their uncontrolled multiplication. These are, in particular: (i) A multilayered corporate structure, (ii) the shift towards ‘Things-as-a-Service’, (iii) the interoperability with third party Things and software, (iv) the rise of ‘prosumers,’ (v) the widespread integration of cloud computing into the IoT (‘Cloud of Things’), and (vi) the wave of sustainability.
