Data about consumers has long been a prized asset of organizations. As Paul Schwartz has observed, the “monetary value” of consumer data continues to grow significantly and companies eagerly profit from consumer data.1 The IoT will foster an exponential growth in the volume, quality, and variety of consumer-generated data. As a result, there will be more of our data available for companies to analyze, exploit, and extract value from. As we have seen in previous chapters, several legal scholars have highlighted the limits of companies’ privacy policies and conditions of use, and the role of these documents in enabling data disclosures.

As we have seen, the law wields considerable influence over the rights and remedies available to us as consumers. Several areas of commercial law are ill-equipped to sufficiently protect our consumer interests in the IoT age. This is because various legal frameworks governing commercial practices have not been sufficiently reformulated to account for the growing connections between the world of privacy and the world of commercial law. As earlier sections of this book have demonstrated, there are multiple legal frameworks impacting commercial practices at the federal and state level that are ripe for significant legal reform. These sources of law include contract law, the FAA, products liability law, the CDA, debt collection law, the Bankruptcy Code, and secured financing laws.