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What if those new jeans you've just bought start tweeting(吱吱地叫)about your location as you cross London Bridge?
It sounds far-fetched, but it's possible－if one of your coats is equipped with a tiny radio-frequency identification device(RFID), your location could be revealed without you knowing about it．
RFIDs are chips that use radio waves to send data to a reader－which in turn can be connected to the web．
This technology is just one of the current ways of allowing physical objects to go online－a concept called the “Internet of things”, which industry insiders have shortened to IoT．
This is when not only your PC, tablet and smartphone can connect to the web, but also your car, your home, your baseball cap and even the sheep and cows on a farm．
Smart buildings and intelligent cars with assigned IP addresses are already making cities smarter－and soon enough, the entire planet may follow．
“A typical city of the future in a full IoT situation could be a place with smart cameras everywhere, neurosensors(神經(jīng)監(jiān)測系統(tǒng))scanning your brain for over-activity in every street,” says Rob van Kranenburg, a member of the European Commission's IoT expert group．
This vision might still be years off, but one by one, “smarter” cities are beginning to crop up around our landscape．
IoT advocates claim that overall interconnectivity would allow us to locate and monitor everything, everywhere and at any time．
“Imagine a smart building where a manager can know how many people are inside just by which rooms are reflecting motion－for instance, via motion-sensitive lights,” says Constantine Valhouli from the Hammersmith Group, a strategy consulting firm．
“This could help save lives in an emergency．”
But as more objects go into the digital world, the fine line that separates the benefits of increasingly smart technology and possible privacy concerns becomes really blurred．
“The IoT challenge is likely to grow both in scale and complexity as seven billion humans are expected to coexist with 70 billion machines and perhaps 70,000 billion ‘smart things', with numbers invading the last fences of personal life,” says Gerald Santucci, head of the networked enterprise and RFID unit at the European Commission．
“In such a new context, the worries increase：to what extent can monitoring of people be accepted? Which principles should govern the deployment of the IoT?”
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