If you want to see how far industry experts have come in defining the internet of things and thinking about how it should work, visit the Open IoT Mark web pages. A group of mostly (European) designers and makers last week gathered together to update documents to create an Open IoT certification mark.
The 2017 document is an update to a document created five years ago that attempted to define what it means to build an open internet of things. Reading the two back-to-back is like coming across your fifth-grade pictures where you can see the shape of your current face, but it’s hidden in youth and less refined.
The 2012 document is much shorter. It covers licensing, accessibility of data, timeliness of data, preservation of privacy, and transparency on how and where data is collected. Five years later, as European rules known as General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) are set to go into effect, some of these concerns have been addressed by the forthcoming law. The law governs data privacy for European citizens.