Could the Inappropriate use of IoT lead to Company Directors ending up in Court?

With the Inventor of the Internet Sir Tim Berners Lee stating on the 30-the anniversary of the birth of the Internet that it is “dysfunctional” 11th BBC March 2019, and major unexplained outages in global web platforms such as Facebook and Instagram being offline since the 13th March 2019 ( the longest outage since 2008), can the internet, its web platforms ever be suitable for anything with a degree of criticality?

Simply, with the clearly identified risks and public statement like those from Sir Tim, directors of any business could be seen criminally negligent if they transferred any service to an IoT platform where failure of any form could lead to lead to loss of life, damage to assets, damage to the environment such as pollution or flooding or serious financial loss through outages.

We all concur that IoT has many useful applications where time delays, outages and loss of data is not critical. But professionals and directors alike globally have a responsibility to invest wisely otherwise they could face the nightmare scenario of ending up in court with their own delayed data being used against them and potentially presented as part of a coroner’s autopsy report or an environmental violation prosecution.

RDN Press Office

14th March 2019