The column – Cyber Security Week
Last week, the sentence inflicted by the Court of Milan to five IT experts was talked so much and written, including some installers of home automation systems, for having violated the most intimate sphere of existence: the one that is consumed behind the door of the house.
Hacked surveillance cameras, video flows diverted on remote servers, private images cataloged and sold on the digital black market as an occasional commodity. The price? Ten euros for fifty accesses. Let’s say that human dignity is taken for granted.
The fact that the credentials of access to scenes of private life are sold at negligible prices reveals the perverse logic of the quantity. It is not necessary for an image to be worth a lot: it is enough that many can sell. And then the body, the face, the newspaper become raw material of an underground economy that knows no scruples.
The house, once the place of the refuge, of the suspension, risks becoming an unconscious set. A stage for foreign eyes, where life happens but it no longer belongs to us.
It would be convenient to label all this as a case of judicial news. But it would also be dangerous. Because what emerges from this story is only yet another confirmation of the vulnerability of the connected devices that I have been saying and writing in books, articles and interviews for ten years.
We welcomed the internet of things as a promise of efficiency and control: thermostats that learn habits, videocophones that follow us on vacation, locks that obey our smartphone. But each connection is a door, and each open door without control can become a passage.
As always, the problem is not technology, but the illusion of neutrality that accompanies it. In an “intelligent” house, the line that separates protection and intrusion fades into the ambiguity underlying the remote reachability of the objects.
Its “non -physical” nature reminds us that the invisible is more difficult to fear. Until it is too late.
There is worse because IoT devices do not just observe: they can act. And if they can act, they can harm.
A smart lock can be opened remotely. An air conditioning system can be sabotaged to damage. Even a smart aspirate, if guided by someone hostile, can turn into an unconscious sentinel or a trigger for greater damage.
Here digital flows into the kinetic: information is no longer only knowledge, but power that is exercised in the physical world. A more disturbing power the more silent.
In this scenario, nobody is innocent by definition. Manufacturers must design safe devices since the row. Instalors must act with ethics and competence. The laws … those will come starting from the European Cyber Resilience Act which will impose security measures and controls to all Smart products.
But also the user, perhaps above all he, must change his gaze. You cannot install a video camera as a more than an ornament. A digital lock cannot be treated as if it were a simple switch.
Living connected implies a new risk literacy. And perhaps also a new idea of home: not only physical space, but ethical and relational perimeter, to be kept.
Each connected object is a question that questions us: are you sure you know who you are entrusting your daily life?
The Iot promises us efficiency, but requires vigilance. And vigilance, unlike control, is not an automatic function, but a form of consciousness.
Observing a camera every now and then I think of the famous phrase of Nietzsche
“… if you look for a long time in an abyss, the abyss will also want to look inside you.”
