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.
Netflix is by far the biggest online streaming video service. Last week, researcher Parks Associates estimated that about half of all U.S. households with a broadband Internet connection subscribed to...
The latest numbers announced by Parks Associates shows that Apple is still leading the smartphone market but the lead is not as big as we thought it will be with Samsung, their biggest rival tagging c...
Parks Associates has announced that the churn rate for OTT video services is 19% of US broadband households, indicating roughly one in five households have cancelled an OTT service in the past 12 mont...
Those who prefer streaming video-on-demand aren’t shy about sharing passwords. About 6 percent of U.S. broadband households use an over-the-top video service paid by someone living outside of the hous...
