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Navigant Research, 2017, believes that the concept of a smart home is the top tier of intelligence,
interoperability, and automation in the home. It goes beyond individual connected devices and “do-it-
yourself” home automation solutions and involves comprehensive, integrated platforms where an ecosystem
of interoperable devices is supported by software and services.

WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY
The home is the heart of the family and is the most sacred target for anyone in the consumer market. It is
often said, the most powerful and valuable invitation is to go into someone’s home and to experience how
someone lives. If I know how you live, I can tailor any product to fit your needs. Similarly, if I know how you
use appliances and equipment, I can calibrate my supply chain for greater levels of efficiency and improve
the user experience to your satisfaction. The same can be said for your residential energy use. If that data
is aggregated over millions of households, it contains extremely valuable knowledge and insights.
EFINITION (S)
The SMART home generates thousands of kilobytes of data from connected devices and this is extremely
valuable and the reason for so much excitement in the industry and emerging trends. Smart home solutions
provide the framework that enables companies to learn more about their customers, which means they
can sell more services more effectively, retain more customers, and ultimately generate more revenue in an
increasingly challenging and competitive business climate. SMART home solutions are a natural progression
from the existing offerings of many service providers, which is why many of the existing smart home products
and services are peddled through value propositions relating to energy, security, home automation, comfort
and convenience, entertainment and health and wellness. Bloomberg, in a February 2023 publication, is
projecting the global Smart Home Automation Market to Hit $444.98 Billion by 2030 based on the latest
report by Grand View Research, Inc.

With all this great value, comes the concerns that restrict the mainstream adoption. Outside of interoperability
issues where companies aren’t coalescing around seamless device integration and the numerous
communicating standards and protocols in the marketplace, there is the elephant in the room, which has
to do with the privacy and security of the data. Customers are cautious about technologies that they feel
are “spying” on them. I have a friend who has an Alexa Home Assistant (Echo Show 10) in her kitchen which
she intended to use primarily for recipes and cooking. She says it freaks her out now. She believes that the
device is listening to her conversations and making recommendations about things that she never asked for!
For those who are familiar with the Echo Show 10, the screen rotates and follows you as you move around
the room. That’s rather freaky!

As smart home technology becomes more pervasive, smart home devices are increasingly being used by
non-technical users who may have little understanding of the technology or how to properly mitigate the
privacy and security risks. This was brilliantly examined in the 2020 NIST publication titled “Smart Home
Security and Privacy Mitigations: Consumer Perceptions, Practices and Challenges”. In this paper, 40 smart
home users were interviewed to discover their security and privacy concerns and mitigation strategies.
Interestingly, while the results demonstrated a number of concerns, there was a general willingness to
accept the risk for the perceived benefit. Additionally, the acceptance of the risk wasn’t accompanied by
users taking any mitigation action even though most of these actions would be very simple to do and not
technical in nature. Then there are some others that are complicated, including frequent software and
security upgrades. Unfortunately, many of the smart home device manufacturers may not provide privacy
and security protections and configuration options, or if they do, these options may not be transparent to
the user.

Since their inception, smart home devices have become the target of security attacks, placing consumers’
data, privacy and safety at risk and would raise concerns about privacy and protection of potentially sensitive
customer data.

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