Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Network Security: Hacking Fears Could Scare Consumers Away from Smart-Home Devices

The rising occurrence of high-profile security hacks and privacy breaches, as well as being personally victimized, are contributing to ever-increasing consumer anxiety about smart home devices and platforms, according to new research.

Parks Associates’ latest quarterly survey of 10,000 U.S. broadband households found that almost half of consumers rank data security and privacy issues as their greatest concerns about connecting devices to the Internet, compared to other problems they may encounter, such as with tech support. Forty percent of the respondents say they have experienced a privacy or security problem with a connected device in the past year, most commonly viruses and malware.

“Our most recent data reveals that almost half of U.S. broadband households are ‘very concerned’ [rating 6-7 on a 7-point scale] about hackers getting control of connected devices and hackers getting access to data from the device,” says Parks Associates Research Analyst Brad Russell. “In tracing trending changes on these consumer attitudes from 2014 to 2016, we find that while the total share of consumers who are ‘concerned’ [rating 5-7] has not appreciably changed, the share of those that are ‘very concerned’ has grown by 6% to 7%. Similarly, the share of consumers who are ‘not concerned [rating 1-3] has shrunk by about half.”

From the article "Network Security: Hacking Fears Could Scare Consumers Away from Smart-Home Devices" by Rodney Bosch.

Previously In The News

Apple TV Shows Faith

Parks Associates' data of 2015 HDTV streaming video player unit sales spurred AppleInsider to write: "Apple saw a big boost in market share thanks to the launch of the fourth-generation Apple TV with...

Facebook Says, Unlike Netflix, It Does Not Degrade Its Video For Mobile

More than half of all US households with broadband subscribe to Netflix, according to Parks Associates. "I predicted this would occur sooner or later", he continued, noting that subjecting all Inte...

How can service providers shift into the center of the smart home experience?

According to research from Parks Associates, the majority of American consumers (60%) buys or leases their residential gateway from their internet service provider (ISP). However, existing gateways ar...

Energy Bundled Services In Homes

The number of homes with BOTH broadband and solar PV doubled in the last two years as the number of broadband households that have adopted rooftop solar PV panels grew to 4 percent cross nation by the...