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 May Be Prepping Siri for Smart Home Duty

Entry into the smart speaker market makes sense for a company with smart home aspirations. "As the success of Echo and Google Home took off, everyone expected Apple to follow suit," said Brad Russe...

Stat Firm Reports Less Than 1% of Subscribers Playing Netflix Games

“Netflix should continue to be vigilant and observant of consumer response as it builds out its still-nascent games portfolio, but I don’t believe it should be overly concerned,” said Parks Associates...

Roku cuts price on top streaming player to counter Apple TV

Although it is much smaller than its rivals, Roku is the leading seller of video streaming players in the U.S. with a 37 percent share of the market, according to the research firm Park Associates....

Smart Homes: The Power, the Pleasure and the Pain

Amazon's servers were down for a large part of the morning on the day the outage occurred, taking Alexa-powered devices out of commission. Incidents like this may occur more often as the popularity of...