Keeping Your Smart Home Safe

The Promise of IoT
About 4% of the world's population was on the internet when Kevin Ashton, a British scientist working at Proctor and Gamble (P&G) used the term the "Internet of Things" in a 1999 presentation he was working on. The presentation focused on the use of radio frequency identification tags (RFID) in the P&G supply chain. His argument was that computers could be much more efficient if they weren't dependent on humans to input data. He wrote, "If we had computers that knew everything there was to know about things-using data they gathered without any help from us-we would be able to track and count everything, and greatly reduce waste, loss, and cost. We would know when things needed replacing, repairing or recalling, and whether they were fresh or past their best. We need to empower computers with their own means of gathering information, so they can see, hear and smell the world for themselves, in all its random glory. RFID and sensor technology enable computers to observe, identify, and understand the world-without the limitations of human-entered data."

Fast Forward to 2018
The world Ashton wrote about is becoming a reality. Gartner, Inc. forecasts that by 2020 there will be 20.4 billion connected things in use worldwide. The use of "Smart" technology in many of the products we use in our homes is enabling seamless connections between devices, people, networks, and services.