Impressions and Insights from the 2015 International CES
This past week the team at Navigate attended the 2015 International Consumer
Electronic Show, commonly referred to as the CES, in Las Vegas Nevada. It was our first
time attending the show, and frankly we approached it with a bit of trepidation due to its
sheer size, number of attendees (approximately 170,000) and exhibitors (approximately
3,600); so we arrived with the modest expectation of hoping we would learn something.
What we found was an incredibly content rich experience that actually was easier to
navigate (pun intended) than we expected.
As privacy professionals in the “land where tech rules” we had not expected privacy
to be a topic of discussion. Much to our pleasant surprise, however, privacy was a topic of
conversation at every single keynote and every track of presentations we attended. The
comments delivered by CEOs and senior leaders of organizations that will likely control
arguably some of the biggest “Big Data” collections in the world were thoughtful and serious.
During our time at the conference we attended keynotes delivered by BK Yoon of
Samsung and Mark Fields of the Ford Motor Company, and we followed four tracks of
presentations: Fitness, Sports, Connected Cars and Education. Additionally we surveyed the
show floor several times to get a sense for the technology on display within these tracks.
Below is a summary of the impressions and learnings we are taking away from this year’s
conference.
While we know there has been a great deal of press coverage of the show, we thought
others may find benefit from hearing about the show through the lens of a privacy
practitioner. We hope you find this summary informative and useful in your work, and will
enjoy the sense of the show without the aching feet and long lines!
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Internet of Things
Mr. Yoon’s keynote kicked off the show with an in-depth description and vision of
the Internet of Things (“IoT”). During his address, he brought several other individuals to
the stage to speak including an economist, the CEOs of SmartThings and Jawbone, and a
Senior Vice President of BMW. The discussion focused on the IoT as a world of infinite
possibilities centered on humans. Within 5 years it was predicted that all Samsung devices
would be IoT devices.
Throughout this keynote several themes were emphasized as being critical for
successful adoption of the potential and vision of the IoT:
•
Human-centric focus – technology is not about things it is about people.
•
Embedded sensors in all things – processing power and connectivity is what will
deliver the IoT.
•
The need to address critical challenges:
o common sets of codes, regulations and standards to advance interoperability;
o business, government and civil society joining together to protect the privacy
and security of data, and to ensure everyone has access to the IoT; and
o an open ecosystem to allow for collaboration across industries and the ability
of devices to connect to each other.
It really started the show off right to hear privacy mentioned as a critical need to
delivering on the promise of the IoT. It also left the strong impression that this connected
universe is well on its way to arriving, and the haunting concern that, from an operational
privacy perspective, the thousands of companies that will contribute to that new universe,
may be woefully under informed about what it means to function in a privacy-sensitive
manner. Concern, however, is just the flip side of promise and so for those of us in the
privacy profession, our knowledge and advice will be an invaluable input.
Mobility and the Connected Car
According to the numbers quoted by different speakers, by the end of next year it is
expected there will be 25 million connected vehicles around the world, with that number
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growing to 150 million by 2020 and by 2025 every car will be connected in some way. Given
these numbers we spent a fair amount of time at the CES learning about the Connected Car.
Our education began with an excellent keynote by Mark Fields, the CEO of the Ford Motor
Company, which kicked off Day 2.
Mr. Fields’ discussion included several other Ford executives, and the focus was on
solving the world’s mobility challenges. Four megatrends were described as creating
pressure on the world’s ability to move: urbanization, the rise of the global middle class, air
quality and health risks from congestion and changing consumer attitudes. The discussion
outlined the enablers that are necessary to tackle the challenge of mobility: Connectivity,
Software and Sensor Technology and Big Data.
Mr. Fields made it extremely clear that Ford believes consumers own their data, and
that Ford is just a steward of it. He committed to transparency in the collection and
handling of information from people’s cars, and said that explicit opt-in must be required. It
was a thrill to hear such a strong statement made, but even more of a thrill to hear the
spontaneous applause that erupted from the audience when he made these commitments.
Later in the conference we attended different presentations on the Connected Car.
Most of these were very large sessions with over 300 attendees each. Here are some of the
key learnings we took away from these discussions:
•
Connectivity to cars may be found by what is built into the car, what a consumer
brings into the car (think smartphones), and what is beamed into the car (think XM
radio).
•
Connectivity will have a lot of purposes including infotainment, safety, car
operations, traffic flow/mobility, consumer “deals” (coupons, insurance discounts) and
maintenance.
•
Nearly 1 gig of data is generated by a car EVERY MINUTE.
•
The cloud will play the key processing, back-end, and analytic role with information
being sent from the car to the cloud, and then the cloud sending “value add”
information back to the car.
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•
Computing power within the car, however, will increase dramatically as well; one
vendor just released the world’s first teraflops mobile processor the size of your
thumbnail for in-vehicle integration.
•
Connectivity will need to be constant.
•
To realize the vision of self-driving (autonomous) cars, advanced cameras, deep neural
networks and machine learning will be required.
•
Challenges:
o Distracted driving needs to be tackled with improved and alternative user
interfaces including voice and gesture recognition.
o Security of the information is being approached from an industry perspective
with a deep partnership being formed between Detroit and Silicon Valley, and
the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration forming an
information sharing and analysis center (“ISAC”) with the global automakers.
Beyond the technical aspects of security a key question will be who is
responsible for the security of the information in the car? If the original
manufacturer is, then what does that imply for the local non-dealer mechanic
you may prefer to bring your car to for service and maintenance? These are
questions yet to be answered.
o Privacy - According to a Gartner representative speaking at the conference,
61% of individuals are concerned about the privacy of their information
generated by their car; to deal with this concern affirmative consent must be
gained for sharing of information.
Fitness and Sports Technology
Another major focus of our time was on learning more about the exploding fitness
and sports technology areas. According to the CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association
the amount of “wearables” will grow 108% in 2015.
During presentations on both of these tracks we heard from leaders of product
companies describe the desire to capture more information about the human body, and then
to add value back to the consumer, coach or athlete through actionable, context-specific
alerts and recommendations. One speaker from the industry had a sense that the industry
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may start to segment with companies specializing in the data aggregator role possibly
separating from the companies specializing in the data collection/hardware role.
The ability to collect deeper, continuous and more sensitive metrics about bodily
functions is directly tied to the development of sensor technology.
Our impression was that the organizations with devices that have been subject to the
FDA approval process as medical devices appeared to be the most cognizant of regulatory
requirements such as HIPAA, but everyone seemed to be generally aware that privacy and
security were topics that had to be addressed. Opt in from consumers was spoken of almost
as an industry accepted default. For many of these companies the topics of privacy and
security were intimately tied with the question of consumer trust. Given the rapidly
growing and crowded wearables market, the sense we had was that while not a product
differentiator, no one wants to have an issue in relation to privacy and security because there
are plenty of other companies and offerings that will be right there to take their place.
For products that are used as part of company wellness programs, it was emphasized
that it is very important to have a strong stance on privacy and for the wearable provider to
directly address this with the company sponsoring the program. Educating the participating
employees around what data is collected and how it is shared is vital to their participation
within the program. In many cases employers choose only to receive aggregated or
anonymized data; or if accessing individual data, only the most innocuous information (e.g.,
number of steps walked) for purposes such as a rewards program. Again, transparency and
express consent were emphasized as critical to making the programs work.
Transforming EDU
Education was the fourth track of presentations we attended. We had the very good
fortune to hear a presentation by David Levin, CEO of McGraw-Hill Education. Mr. Levin
reviewed very compelling statistics regarding the state of higher education and provided
thoughts on how to develop technology that will drive results. One of the most telling
statistics shared was that 51% of students study on their smartphone, once again
reconfirming the ubiquitous connected use of the computer in our pockets.
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He also raised the topic of privacy. He made it very clear that privacy is fundamental
to the integration of technology and education. McGraw-Hill has a CPO and they are keen
to define privacy standards in this space. McGraw-Hill’s perspective is that the data belongs
to the student, and should be accessible to the instructor as it is now, but for broader
educational and analytical use anonymized information is all that is needed. It was yet again
another strong endorsement by an industry executive for the bread-and-butter of privacy transparency, individual ownership and anonymization. His conclusion was that technology
will help with higher education only by being open and integrated with faculty, students,
pedagogy, content, infrastructure and privacy.
From the Exhibit Floor
Walking the exhibitor space of the CES is somewhat of a sensory overload but there
were two areas in particular that we wanted to see. The first was the “Personal Privacy”
section. The products in the space overwhelmingly focused on financial protections and
electronic wallets. It was a fascinating comparison to walk from the Personal Privacy section
where everything is about keeping information private over to the Smart Home section
where everything is about cameras and monitoring and sensing people’s activities.
The other section we were looking for was “Cybersecurity.” We found one vendor
with a suite of products related to secure email and document exchange, but we couldn’t
seem to easily find additional vendors in this space. Vendors in this space will likely have a
more prominent presence next year.
A key impression however from walking the floor in general is that convergence,
integration and connectivity really are everywhere. Products connecting to other products
left us with the feeling of wading through virtual rivers of information – yet again giving rise
to the dual sensation of concern and promise.
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