Connected world is scary concept

Toothbrushes that monitor whether you are brushing every tooth thoroughly enough, tennis rackets that analyse your game, cars that can send out a cellular distress signal - including what nick your airbags are in and where you are - and watches that know your heart rate.

All this and more is coming to a store near you soon, if it isn't already there. Much of it is already available to play with - and buy - from international outlets.

The technology we are bringing into our everyday lives is really cool, and it adds a huge amount of convenience - not so much the toothbrushes though, that will add time to our daily grind. Yet, all this wonderfulness that will be the norm in the next few years comes with a price. A heavy price: privacy.

Already companies like Discovery are taking advantage of the connected world. When you sign up for vehicle insurance and agree to install a tracking device, you stand to get a better insurance premium.

Except that when you tick the Ts and Cs box, you generally sign away any right to the data that is being collected by such devices. So now your insurer knows how often you speed, brake harshly, tear around corners and drive like a hooligan.

What's the bet this information will soon be filtering into the medical aid cover it offers? "No sir, you are at high risk of trashing your car, so we need to add a surcharge to your hospital cover."

All these devices collect data. Tons of it. And because they all are connected, they have IP addresses that can be linked back to you.

I had a quick chat with a chap from Oral B and asked him how long it would be before they were supplying my data to my medical aid provider. He looked, to be fair, genuinely affronted that I would even suggest such a thing. No, no, he exclaimed, that would be illegal. Ah yes, privacy laws. How long do you think it will take for some genius lawyer to find a loophole?

Next thing you know, just to brush your teeth, you'll be agreeing to have all your tooth brushing habits collated, sent off to your medical aid provider, collated with your bad driving habits and - voila - when you have a car accident you will also be toothless because the premiums have been based on a risk assessment, and jumping stop streets and not brushing twice a day are bad habits.

It will get to the point where we won't be able to get cover unless we prove we're genuinely responsible, healthy people. And the only way to do that will be to share all our information. Add in data that can be collected from our smart homes: what time do you get up? Go to bed? Are you just eating take-outs?

All it takes is one clever hacker with access to brilliant software and our entire lives will be laid totally bare.

Now, I'm not saying the medical aid sector is evil and will be the only one to take advantage of the big data the Internet of things will bring us - once there is an ironclad way of dealing with the information - but am rather using this example as a sketch to show the possibilities.

Simply, everything we do with every connected device we own (50 billion in circulation by 2020, according to Cisco) creates data that goes somewhere. Onto some sort of a server. And there's a ton of data that will be stored on those servers. Put together, it creates a pretty neat mosaic of our lives, a mosaic that I'm sure a data miner would love to get their hands on - legally or otherwise.

Much of what we are putting out there is data we don't even know we are sharing. As Gary Kovacs, AVG CEO, told an audience at Mobile World Congress 2015, even simple free games have Ts and Cs that are onerous, and collect a ton of information they just don't need: our location, phone numbers, browsing habits...

All it takes is one clever hacker with access to brilliant software and our entire lives will be laid totally bare, beyond the stuff we have put online, like via Facebook. That scares me.

But what scares me even more is that it will be impossible to disconnect from this world and go off the grid if you want any semblance of a normal life.

That's why industry and government need to act now; to make sure the right protections are put in place and that we all know what we are getting ourselves into.