Mechanisms for meaningful consent in internet of things

Consent is a key measure for privacy protection and needs to be ‘meaningful’ to give people informational power. It is increasingly important that individuals are provided with real choices and are empowered to negotiate for meaningful consent. Meaningful consent is an important area for consideration in IoT systems since privacy is a significant factor impacting on adoption of IoT. Obtaining meaningful consent is becoming increasingly challenging in IoT environments. It is proposed that an “apparency, pragmatic/semantic transparency model” adopted for data management could make consent more meaningful, that is, visible, controllable and understandable. The model has illustrated the why and what issues regarding data management for potential meaningful consent [1]. In this paper, we focus on the ‘how’ issue, i.e. how to implement the model in IoT systems. We discuss apparency by focusing on the interactions and data actions in the IoT system; pragmatic transparency by centring on the privacy risks, threats of data actions; and semantic transparency by focusing on the terms and language used by individuals and the experts. We believe that our discussion would elicit more research on the apparency model’ in IoT for meaningful consent.