Human Data Interaction for IoT: The Ownership Aspect

As Internet of Things (IoT) becomes a growing reality, more ubiquitous devices are embedded in our daily lives, serving us in a broad range of purposes from: personal healthcare to large scale traffic monitoring. These devices primarily collect data that is about or produced by people, be it street noise level of a neighbourhood, or the energy footprint of an individual's home or his location for social application purposes. As this unprecedented amount of data is collected, we are challenged with one fundamental research question : who owns this data and who should have access to it? Specifically, the emergent of the Human Data Interaction (HDI) topic which aims to put the human at the centre of the data driven industry, calls attention to the IoT community to address the data ownership aspect more carefully. In this note, we offer a reflection on the challenges that IoT faces in regards to the data ownership in HDI and advocate the roles that both ordinary people and industries must play to best answer those challenges in shaping IoT landscape.