 What do an umbrella, a shark, a house plant, the brake pads in a mining truck and a smoke detector have in common? They can all be connected online and in fact they are. By 2022 it is expected that more than a trillion sensors will be connected to the internet. If all things are connected it will shift the way we do business and use resources and will eventually yield massive amounts of data. But who owns this data and how safely will it be kept? By 2020 around 22% of the world's cars will be connected to the internet. That's 290 million vehicles and by 2024 more than 50% of home internet traffic will be used by appliances and devices rather than just for communication and entertainment. In this scenario what if your car or your home got hacked? The internet of things raises huge questions on privacy and security that have to be addressed by governments, corporations and consumers. But if we get things right it will also bring unprecedented efficiency to processes that will no longer be offline. Imagine cows in a farm being monitored to obtain health reports that will help farmers feed them better or tracking the behaviour of complex industrial machinery preventing accidents and shortening downtime for maintenance. All kinds of devices will be able to gather and share any type of information from their environment seamlessly organising themselves to make our lives smarter and safer. A world where all things are connected is going to bring endless opportunities for most human activities but it will depend on us whether we are going to take advantage of it or let it take advantage of us. Will data be collected, shared and stored to improve our lives or will it be used to control us?