When IoT devices operate not only with the owner of the device but also with third parties, identifying the device using a permanent identifier, e.g., a hardware identifier, can present privacy problems due to the identifier facilitating tracking and correlation attacks. A changeable identifier can be used to reduce the risk on privacy. This paper looks at using decentralised identifiers (DIDs), an upcoming standard of self-sovereign identifiers with multiple competing implementations, with IoT devices. The paper analyses the resource requirements of running DIDs on the IoT devices and finds that even quite small devices can successfully deploy DIDs and proposes that the most constrained devices could rely on a proxy approach. Finally, the privacy benefits and limitations of using DIDs are analysed, with the conclusion that DIDs significantly improve the users’ privacy when utilised properly.

People use social media to achieve particular gratifications despite expressing concerns about the related privacy risks that may lead to negative consequences. This inconsistency between privacy concerns and actual behaviour has been referred to as the privacy paradox. Although several possible explanations for this phenomenon have been provided over the years, they each consider only some of the obstacles that stand in the way of informed and rational privacy decisions, and they usually assume a static situation, thus neglecting the changes taking place over time. To overcome these limitations, this article incorporates all the key privacy obstacles into a qualitative system dynamics model and examines the conditions under which the privacy paradox emerges over time in the context of social media. The results show that the privacy obstacles prevent adequately accounting for the negative consequences by (1) reinforcing gratifications, thus inducing social media adoption and use, while (2) hampering the realisation of (all) negative consequences, thus reducing the motivation for social media discard. Moreover, gratifications kick off early and often seem to dominate even major long-term negative consequences, thereby resulting in users becoming only gradually concerned about privacy, by which time they are usually deeply engaged in the platform to consider discarding, and therefore arriving in a paradoxical situation that seems not viable to escape from (i.e., the boiling frog syndrome). Conversely, major short-term negative consequences are more likely to conflict with gratifications already earlier, thereby resulting in users becoming less engaged, more concerned, and therefore still able to discard the platform, thus resolving the paradoxical situation.

Despite the rapid spread of Internet of Things (IoT) systems, the lack of interoperability between the systems is significantly hindering their business and societal potential. Moreover, a major challenge for wider interoperability is that the IoT systems can be owned by multiple independent entities, whose collaboration will need to be organised to ensure their interoperability. One approach for achieving this is to establish federations supported by Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), as this enables interoperability between entities and collaboration between business platforms, thereby overcoming many technical and administrative difficulties. DLTs can provide the required transparency and immutability for management of the federations, thus increasing trust and reducing the risk of misbehaviour that could destabilise the federation. This paper presents two system dynamics simulation models, which demonstrate that the success of a federation (with or without DLT support) is inversely related to the short-term selfishness of its members, and we then proceed to show that DLTs can improve the feedback received by the federation members on their actions by promoting a common consensus, which in turn can make the federation more resilient.