Written by Sabrina Palme, CEO at Palqee Technologies
How data privacy impacts adoption of Smart Home devices and services
You wake up to your alarm
Your AI assistant wishes you a good morning, tells you about the weather forecast, any meetings you have for the day and that the bathroom has been heated up to your preferred temperature for your morning shower.
As you prepare your breakfast, your fridge lets you know that you’re soon running out of eggs and cheese and orders new ones for you. You confirm the order with your smart watch. You see a notification has also been sent to your health tracking app, noticing that your increased level of cheese consumption combined with reduced workout sessions the last weeks, may be the reason for the slight increase of body fat percentage. The app and your AI assistant have also been tracking your sleep cycles, mood changes in voice and signs of stress through your pulse levels and breathing rhythm. Your AI assistant recommends you to do 2–3 workouts for your mental and physical health. You leave for work.
The smart lock on your door is connected to your phone and registers that everyone has left the house. All sensors and machines go on standby, keeping the ideal temperature and humidity for the buildings’ maintenance and least amount of impact on the environment. While at work, your outdoor camera recognises a courier through facial recognition, you receive a request to let the courier in to securely leave the parcel in your home.
You come back from work exhausted and you just want to relax. You ask your AI assistant to pick out 3 movies that can help you achieve that and calm down. Based on your Netflix history and your stressed mood and emotional responses to movies measured through your smart watch(e.g. increased pulse) in the past, your AI assistant is able to accurately pick 3 movies that match your mood and would help you to relax. You choose a movie and call it a day.
You may think the above describes an almost utopian like world…
but the reality is that we’re actually not far away from this kind of lifestyle. The concept of Smart Homes where IoT enabled devices communicate with one another to offer you a smarter, easier and more sustainable way of living has been around for quite some time. And while most of these are still more gadgets than useful tools, deal with interoperability issues and operate mostly on their own, the technology already exists.
Smart buildings will be able to manage themselves for minimal environmental impact while being in constant exchange with its inhabitants.
The question arises, while our Smart Home supports us in our everyday lives is there a downside to it?
For Smart Homes to be smart, they need mainly one thing: Data. Data about you and how you interact and move around in your home. Every move and interaction is tracked and analysed, creating a very accurate persona of you, knowing potentially more about you than you do yourself. The health app knows about your eating behaviours and workout routines and your fridge can tell if you live an unhealthy single life or whether you’re a father with 2 teenage kids.
Our home is the place we feel most private, protected and intimate and the providers of Smart Home appliances could get a detailed insight into that world.
A recent study published by Springer has looked into privacy concerns in the smart home context.
The global market for Smart Home appliances is expected to reach $125.07 billion by 2023 and global market penetration is forecasted to reach 19.5%.
Thus far, not much insights have been available how adoption and growth of the Smart Home appliances market may be negatively impacted over privacy concerns. The study found that concerns over privacy is one of six different risk types connected to technology-based innovations and form a major challenge to overcome and address for Smart Home manufacturers and service strategies. For Smart Home systems to work, the interaction between user and provider is necessary. As the behaviour of a user changes, so will the Smart Homes systems need to be able to adapt and respond to create value.
If privacy concerns are directly linked to adoption of Smart Home products and services, addressing it adequately as a Smart Home manufacture means building up a competitive advantage over other products and solutions in the market.
Manufactures that are able to embrace data privacy as part of their product development requirements, will be able to build a more trusted relationship with their users and increase adoption rates.
This is quite interesting and in line with other studies, such as the one conducted by the dma in 2018 “Data privacy: What the consumer really thinks”, showing that there is a general misconception people don’t want to share their data. In fact, many consumers are happy to share their data in exchange for benefits, however, under the condition there is transparency and that there are controls to manage personal data access. Products that offer easy understanding how data is used and similarly, being able to easily adjust privacy settings are greatly favoured over products that don’t offer this kind of insight and control.
At this point of time, the technology and connectivity of Smart Homes and devices is evolving, but the use of data and how it is used remains largely opaque and isn’t really being addressed.
In practical terms, transparency over data usage is probably not the hardest challenge to solve, but controls that allows users to easily manage their data use and level of engagement they wish to have with the provider is not. This in itself is tricky. It is unlikely that users are willing to download a new app every time they purchase a Smart Home device and service from a different provider to control and adjust their privacy settings.
Providers will not just need to build for technical interoperability with other manufactures, but for privacy settings interoperability as well. Even more so as devices communicate with one another, the privacy standard will need to work across all devices. A “one size fits all” privacy solution won’t do it either as pointed out by the Springer research. Different people have different expectations in regards to their privacy.
Personally, privacy concerns about how my data is used has been the main deciding factor for me not to purchase any AI assistance and smart home appliances thus far as I’d be concerned about my privacy at home.
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