Privacy and Security Nutrition Labels to Inform IoT Consumers

IoT consumers are concerned about the privacy and security of their smart devices, but they cannot do much about it at the time of purchase. This is due to the unavailability of such information when making a purchase decision, at least in the US and most countries. In the past few years, Finland, UK, and Singapore have started designing a label for IoT devices to inform consumers about the privacy and security practices of smart devices at the point of sale. We believe US consumers have the same right to know how their devices handle their information. Therefore, we decided to bring this much-needed transparency to consumers at the time of purchase. By conducting a series of studies and incorporating inputs from thousands of consumers and experts, we developed an informative and usable privacy and security label for IoT devices. In addition, to help manufacturers easily create these labels for their products, we developed a tool to generate the human and machine readable formats of the labels.