Exploding Gas Tanks: Risk, Liability and Internet of Things

We like to construct Hollywood friendly plots around a lot of the seminal moments in our collective history. For Civil Rights, we like to picture the integration of Little Rock High School, Rosa Parks’ courageous protest on a Birmingham bus or the March on Washington. For environmentalism, we talk about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or, maybe, the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. (This vintage news footage of the 1969 fire calls it the fire that “sparked the environmental movement” without any apparent irony.) For automobile safety, we imagine Ralph Nader and the image of a 1972 crash test that shows the gas tank of the Ford Pinto exploding in a rear impact collision, engulfing both cars in flames. But those memories are often way oversimplified. Little Rock and the Birmingham bus strike were just two battles in a fight for civil rights that went back to the end of the Civil War. Likewise, the Cuyahoga fire in 1969 was just one of a string of similar fires on the same river, going back decades. By some accounts – it wasn’t even the worst of them. And the fight for better automobile safety, likewise, began long before Ralph Nader or the Pinto came onto the scene. In other words, progress is slow and almost always incremental, rather than revolutionary.  And so it will be with the kinds of privacy and security issues we face today as a whole universe of new, intelligent and Internet connected technology invades our homes, workplaces, automobiles and clothing.