Consumers Anticipate Benefits, Privacy Compromises of Smart Home: Survey

A new Intel Security-sponsored survey is indicating that consumers around the world may be willing to make compromises to accommodate the rise of the smart home.

Conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne, the survey consulted 9,000 people across Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Mexico, the UK, and the US. Most respondents – 77 percent – said they expect the smart home to be as common by the year 2025 as the smartphone is now, and 75 percent expect to benefit from it. At the same time, 92 percent of respondents expressed concern about smart home data’s vulnerability to hack attacks.

Looking to security measures, 75 percent of respondents expressed anxiety about having to remember a number of passwords for smart home products, and 40 percent expected passwords to become a source of frustration in such a setting. Meanwhile, according to a statement from Intel Security, “biometrics scored well as an alternative for accessing smart homes.”

It’s also worth noting that while many analysts are justly concerned about potential privacy intrusions stemming from IoT devices in the home and elsewhere, 54 percent of this survey’s respondents said they may be willing to share their own smart home data with companies for compensation, with millennials being particularly open to the idea. That could allow for business models echoing that of Google, which has developed a reputation for mining user data to subsidize its own products. But with data privacy becoming an increasingly politicized concept as more information is stored on digital devices, it isn’t clear how such attitudes could evolve as the IoT and the smart home take shape.