# Internet of Nano-Things, Things and Everything: Future Growth Trends
## 6 Challenges and Impediments to IoT
### Ethical Issues  
IoT devices are expected to permeate the whole fabric of our socio-technical ecosystem, including not just the implementation of Smart Cities, but also invasively within our bodies for total healthcare. This naturally raises many ethical issues that need to be resolved to allay the concerns of the public. Protection from eavesdropping of medically sensitive data is paramount to protect patient confidentiality. Also, protection from hacking, which would have particularly disastrous consequences for medical monitoring and equipment maintenance, must be guaranteed to safeguard life. Any automation of manual labor risks employee redundancy and hence potentially massive job losses. This is particularly so for unskilled and low-qualified blue-collar workers. Examples of job losses are in the sectors of inventory and stock control, check-out machines in stores and ATMs in banks that now do more than just dispense cash. The use of IoT may consequently lead to the widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. Those particularly disadvantaged are the impoverished and those lacking or with no access to the Internet at all. This is specifically acute for the less industrialized nations and similar regions within an otherwise industrialized country. The erosion of privacy may be seen as inevitable with the adoption of the IoT; however, the professional institution ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) states that it will respect privacy and honor confidentiality. Already the habits of consumers are being collected in minute detail. The granularity of the data collected is expected to get even finer and more intimate with the adoption of IoT and smart devices in the home. Data mining of consumer behavior from diverse and disparate sources allows advertisers and marketing agencies to build up a complex and very rich profile of the consumer. This makes targeted advertising even more relevant to the consumer, an example being that algorithms can even predict whether a female shopper is pregnant before her own awareness. Data mining with data from more and more IoT devices, if uncontrolled, can only help to increase the accuracy of prediction of the short and long-term behavioral patterns of the consumer: as is now well-known, this can extend beyond the commercial domain and into politics as well. Data provenance, including the identity of the \"creator\" of the data and the rights of this \"creator\" need to be clearly identified from the beginning. The creator could be IoT devices themselves, in which case the legal entity constituting the owner of these devices needs to be clearly established beforehand. This is particularly imperative when dealing with financial transactions. Here, another revolutionary technology, the blockchain [62], may help immensely. Thus, the use of data provenance and the blockchain may be utilized to clearly delineate the private domain, public domain and the personal domain of IoT environments [76]. Personal information, as collected especially by IoNT, BloNT, MIoT, CIoT and HIoT, covering medical information in particular, needs to be strongly protected from malicious use and hacking. It is important to ensure protected accessibility to information to safeguard it from virus attacks, hackers and consequent information loss and spoofing as all such attacks may adversely affect the lives of people. A car connected to the Internet may need to be strictly protected from malicious access, as it could be used to cause accidents and kill its occupants or others. Examples of industrial espionage and sabotage include the computer worm \"Stuxnet\", which was used to carry out a cyber-attack on Iranian power stations, as reported by Sky News [77]. However, the grandiose claims by Sky News that Stuxnet could be used to attack any system connected to the Internet, such as utility companies, hospitals, distribution networks, traffic systems and heating/cooling systems were later debunked by Sophos [78] and Eset [79] as \"over the top reporting\".