The rapid rise in the connected sensors, actuators, and their accompanying applications surrounding us, often collectively referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) has lead to a growing interest and attention from the governments, the industry, the scientific community amongst other communities. The numerous opportunities presented by the IoT industry, however, often come at the cost of excessive energy usage, or privacy and security threats, in exchange for fine-grained sensing and data analytics. In this post, I advocate for the use of optimisation trade-offs between the utility and value gained from information, the privacy risks and security threats to the data subject, and the cost (e.g., energy and bandwidth) of performing the sensing and analytics. We argue for leveraging the network edge (i.e., the IoT device itself) to support this optimisation process and provide a cooperative framework between the edge and the cloud. Such an architecture will play a pivotal role in protecting the individuals’ privacy, while reducing the cost of the operation and the privacy and security risks.