The internet of things (IoT) is poised to be the next step in the information revolution. Its effects on people’s quality of life will most likely be equivalent to the impacts felt from the internet.“[T] he core concept is that everyday objects can be equipped with identifying, sensing, networking and processing capabilities that will allow them to communicate with one another and with other devices and services over the Internet to achieve some useful objective”(Whitmore, Agarwal, and Da Xu 2015, 261; my emphasis).

Rather than human-to-human communication, the IoT builds from the simple notion of objects in our world being able to communicate with each other.“In fact, it is this ability for objects to communicate that delivers the power of the IoT”(Fletcher 2015, 20). Moreover, this is not simply a matter of producing and collecting information for its own sake; the intention is to achieve some useful objective. Whether it is about logistics or controlling your house, the IoT derives its importance from the fact that the information produced by the communicating objects is intended to bring about some change in the physical world. The size of the IoT is expected to be immense: it is estimated that by 2020, there will be 20–50 billon things connected as part of the IoT (Mohammed 2015), leading some to predict an investment of 1.7 trillion US dollars by 2020 (International Data Corporation 2015):