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, Hollywood Honchos Put Heads Together

The Apple TV came in fourth, behind Amazon's Fire TV, Google's second-place Chromecast and Roku's pack-leading set-top devices, in Parks Associates' tally of streaming device sales in 2014. Amazon and...

Trust and Value Will Bring IoT Home

The connected car and smart home markets are both at an early stage of development, but in many ways they have been growing in parallel. Both markets are enabled by the falling costs of sensors, netwo...

Sling TV Now Lets You Share An Account — For An Extra $20

“The decision to launch as its own separate multi-stream service was influenced by our customers. Two of the top requests we receive are for a multi-stream capability and for FOX programming. As baseb...

DirecTV Now Goes 'Gangbusters,' And AT&T Stops The Bleeding

Before news broke Friday that AT&T has stopped bleeding TV customers, Parks Associates analyst Brett Sappington tried to put a finger on what sort of subscriber numbers for the company’s new streaming...