Security, Privacy and Ethical Concerns of IoT Implementations in Hospitality Domain

TL;DR

This paper surveys security, privacy, and ethical issues related to IoT deployment in the hospitality industry, highlighting challenges, potential problems, and solutions to guide better practices.

Contribution

It provides a focused analysis of IoT security and privacy concerns in hospitality, offering insights and guidance for industry stakeholders.

Findings

Identifies unique security challenges in hospitality IoT applications

Highlights privacy risks due to extensive customer data collection

Suggests potential solutions for ethical IoT deployment in hotels

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been on the rise in the last decade as it finds applications in various domains. Hospitality is one of the pioneer sectors that has adopted this technology to create novel services such as smart hotel rooms, personalized services etc. Hotels, restaurants, theme parks, and cruise ships are some specific application areas to improve customer satisfaction by creating an intense interactive environment and data collection with the use of appropriate sensors and actuators. However, applying IoT solutions in the hospitality environment has some unique challenges such as easy physical access to devices. In addition, due to the very nature of these domains, the customers are at the epicenter of these IoT technologies that result in a massive amount of data collection from them. Such data and its management along with business purposes also raises new concerns regarding privacy and ethical considerations. Therefore, this paper surveys and analyzes security, privacy and ethical issues regarding the utilization of IoT devices by focusing on the hospitality industry specifically. We explore some exemplary uses, cases, potential problems and solutions in order to contribute to better understanding and guiding the business operators in this sector.