The CSA is introducing smart home data privacy standards

IoT products make people’s lives easier in many ways, but dubious digital privacy practices have long marred their reputations. Countless consumers and experts have complained about the lack of clarity surrounding many products, how much data they collect from users, and how exactly they use it. Now, after many years of these complaints, the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), a group of companies that maintain the Matter, the open-source interoperability standard that allows IoT devices to communicate with each other, will finally do something about it.

The new Data Privacy Working Group

The CSA recently announced it is launching a Data Privacy Working Group to globally harmonize requirements and best practices regarding data privacy and IoT devices that interact with apps and web-based services. The CSA points to the fact that as we add more and more connected devices to our personal spaces, the amount of data we produce will increase exponentially, and protecting it will soon be more complex than it is now, making it harder to ensure consumer data sovereignty. 

That’s why the Data Privacy Working Group aims to create a certification program to help consumers know which products are committed to maintaining their digital privacy and conform to the Alliance Data Privacy specification.

According to the CSA, “The Data Privacy Working Group will help consumers build trust by identifying and strengthening areas of transparency, best practices, and verification. We aim to support customers in better understanding what data is being collected, how it is used, and if it complies with existing privacy requirements”.

The CSA will also standardize health tech

This comes on the heels of the CSA announcing a working group to create standards for health and wellness technology standards. In recent times health tech has become more widely adopted, from Fitbit to telemedicine and at-home testing. It should come as no surprise then that The Health and Wellness Working Group aims to create a common tech standard for major manufacturers to support the interoperability of health and wellness devices. Beyond creating a new standard, the group hopes to identify new ways IoT devices can improve the overall health of society. The CSA believes health tech will “rapidly expand to new healthcare devices and repurposing existing IoT devices to generate data that is vital to our health and wellness”.

Both groups are in their very early stages, so it may be a while before any concrete developments occur.

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