  The Internet-of-Things is emerging as a vast inter-connected space of devices
and things surrounding people, many of which are increasingly capable of
autonomous action, from automatically sending data to cloud servers for
analysis, changing the behaviour of smart objects, to changing the physical
environment. A wide range of ethical concerns has arisen in their usage and
development in recent years. Such concerns are exacerbated by the increasing
autonomy given to connected things. This paper reviews, via examples, the
landscape of ethical issues, and some recent approaches to address these
issues, concerning connected things behaving autonomously, as part of the
Internet-of-Things. We consider ethical issues in relation to device operations
and accompanying algorithms. Examples of concerns include unsecured consumer
devices, data collection with health related Internet-of-Things, hackable
vehicles and behaviour of autonomous vehicles in dilemma situations,
accountability with Internet-of-Things systems, algorithmic bias, uncontrolled
cooperation among things, and automation affecting user choice and control.
Current ideas towards addressing a range of ethical concerns are reviewed and
compared, including programming ethical behaviour, whitebox algorithms,
blackbox validation, algorithmic social contracts, enveloping IoT systems, and
guidelines and code of ethics for IoT developers - a suggestion from the
analysis is that a multi-pronged approach could be useful, based on the context
of operation and deployment.
