Rock Center Fellow Vivek Wadhwa weighs in on the lack of regulation of the “internet of things” and the implications for children in this Washington Post op-ed. 

It was not an auspicious beginning to the holiday season. On Black Friday, we learned that a hacker had broken into the servers of Chinese toymaker VTech and lifted the personal information of nearly five million parents and more than 200,000 children. The data haul included home addresses, names, birth dates, email addresses, and passwords. Worse still, it had photographs and chat logs of parents with their children.

The exploit raised the obvious question: as more toys become connected to the Internet, how many have lax security? And how many millions, or hundreds of millions, of children are in danger due to it? We got a partial answer on Dec. 4, when Bluebox Security discovered serious vulnerabilities in Mattel’s Hello Barbie, the Internet-connected version of the iconic doll toy. It is entirely possible that the majority of Internet-connected toys have serious vulnerabilities. There are many reasons for this.

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My colleagues at Stanford Law School, and many others, have been researching how this would work. Roland Vogl, who heads Codex, the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, envisages a system that allows people to manage and analyze all of their structured data, including those generated by Internet of Things devices. End users would connect their devices to a “personal dashboard,” through which they will be able to monitor and control their data. They would select which data can be shared and with which companies. Vogl says there are already some implementations of these technologies, such as OpenSensors and the Wolfram Connected Devices Project.