Why you should care about GDPR in IoT Enterprises & Solutions

No one argues the usefulness of the Internet of Things. Whether it is for our home comfort or for traffic control, the idea of interconnected devices is merely a consequence of the Internet's growth and holds great potential for bringing good. However, as IoT devices become more common, we pay for the services they support with our personal data and ultimately with our giving away of privacy for comfort. In order to protect citizens from abuses of data usage and regulate companies' behaviors towards private information, governments have come up with regulatory measures that aim to balance the technological growth with the evolution of our societies. The agreement whose impact worldwide was the greatest is EU's General Data Protection Regulation, enforced in 2018. Two years on, such regulations have only been able to tackle the issue of security and no relevant advancements on the privacy front seem to be under development. In this paper we present the problem the regular consumer is facing by explaining why the efforts to ensure the application of the European regulation are not fully applied. The aim is to clarify the consequences of not achieving solid solutions within the context of the Internet of Things and offer some examples of successful GDPR compliant IoT cases where development guidelines for the future can be derived from.