The Cyber-Physical Disruption

This chapter examines four emerging areas of technological innovation in which digital technologies are becoming embedded into the physical world. The digitization of everyday objects includes consumer Internet of things and connected objects in smart cities. The Internet of self encompasses cyberphysical systems entangled with the body, such as wearable technologies, implantable chips, biometric identification devices, and digital medical monitoring and delivery systems. The industrial Internet of things, sometimes called the “fourth industrial revolution,” involves restructurings of industries and labor around cyber-physical systems. Finally, emergent embedded systems include those embedded objects that are born digital, such as robotics, 3D printing, and arguably augmented reality systems. Understanding these heterogeneous technical architectures, and the technological affordances and characteristics they all share, is necessary for understanding emerging governance debates.

Privacy Gets Physical

This chapter addresses the critical area of cyber-physical system privacy. Cyber-physical system privacy concerns encroach into intimate spaces in and around the body and in material spaces of industry, the home and society that were once distinctly bounded from the digital sphere. Privacy problems are also concerns about discrimination, such as using collected data for employment, insurance, and law enforcement decisions. Privacy problems in digital-physical spaces also raise a host of national security concerns. The chapter then explains some of the constraints that complicate privacy and recommends a baseline privacy-protection framework to address this extraordinary policy challenge. Transparency and notice to consumers about data gathering and sharing practices should represent absolute minimal standards of practice. But even this minimal standard is difficult to attain.