The Already today there are more things on the internet than the there are humans But that crossover point happened at the end of 2008 When the number of devices on the internet became larger than the number of people on the internet Currently we have something like 10 billion of them and by 2020 everybody's expecting something like 50 to 60 billion things on the internet So it will be a device dominated network and you cannot really implement the internet things without relying on cloud services And you absolutely do need the methods of big data to deal with the vast amount of information that is being produced by the sensors And I'm very concerned in some ways about the security and privacy challenges that the internet of things will present Because the sheer number the large number of components makes the same problems that we encountered in the normal internet as well Much more difficult to deal with so we have to develop new techniques There needs to be also a consensus in society that we need to talk about how we want to deal with some ethical problems that arise as well So I like to use the simple example of a light bulb to demonstrate what the capabilities and what the chances are but also what the dangers and perils are Remember light bulbs that have the capability to have their own IP address and they're are controllable by a remote or by an app running on any smartphone This is a very simple device with a very simple technology and it's not that expensive anymore So it's totally viable for using homes Using this very simple example you can actually think through many issues and challenges but also many advantages and chances That the internet of things can provide so if you start to think about the question of the IP addresses and try to estimate how many light bulbs are going to have if the This idea catches on you very quickly come into the billions and then you can start to think about the security aspects and the privacy aspects Now you could say that where could the problem be with the light bulb that has an IP address that's surely not a security threat But in fact it is and it is not just because that somebody can turn it on if they hack away into your system But any internet device if there's a vulnerability then these devices can be reprogrammed very easily very quickly And since there are very many of them millions or even billions of them that can be used as a pre-programmed army to do some denial of service attacks or things of that kind That might not be such a big threat in terms of a light bulb However think about a car that gets a firmware update and that's not a rare event anymore Now that the internet thinks it's taking off now is the time to start these intelligent conversations You