Utimaco, a global provider of IT security solutions, has released consumer research that has found a low level of trust around Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This highlights the need for more education from the industry into how smart devices are secured with the latest digital security solutions.
The whitepaper, Circles of Trust 2023: Exploring Consumer Trust in the Digital Society, takes a look at how consumers view trust in an increasingly digital world and builds off the success of last year’s research.
The 2023 survey expands the geographical scope from Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom to include thousands of consumers from Mexico, Singapore and the United States with a focus on attitudes towards the use and security of IoT technology and smart cities.
The research’s general reporting on digital security shows a marked difference between responses from countries with the highest and lowest GDP per capita and those in the center of the GDP per capita distribution.
Put simply, the poorest and richest countries showed the most enthusiasm about digital technology in their lives and the least concern about security, though in the case of the United States, it reports a much higher level of cybercrime than other countries.
IoT, or ‘smart technology’, is expected to grow to $662 billion in 2023, encompassing a range of technologies from next-generation robotics systems in factories to smart light bulbs.
The research found serious stumbling blocks to the widespread trust of IoT technology among consumers, the first and perhaps most significant of which was that only 24 percent believe they’d be able to define the term Internet of Things, indicating the term – though widely used in the industry for many years – has not found its way into the minds of consumers.
On a country level, Singapore had the highest level of respondents who believed they could define the term (33 percent) while the United States came in at 29 percent.
This pattern repeats when consumers were asked if they used IoT technology (26 percent globally said that they did), but interestingly when asked the same question using the term ‘smart technology’ that number jumped to 38 percent.
Also, when asked if they used specific IoT/Smart devices, the research found the majority of those surveyed across all countries used at least one type of smart device: 61 percent owned a Smart TV and 52 percent used a virtual assistant like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home.
On the topic of Smart Cities, only a minority felt confident they could define the term (31 percent globally, but 40 percent and 41 percent in Mexico and Singapore respectively), and general enthusiasm was quite muted. While only 12 percent of consumers saw no advantages to smart cities, the most popular smart city innovation, intelligent traffic control, only saw 47 percent global approval. On the other hand, 60 percent of U.S. respondents cited “technical failures leading to system outages” as the top risk in fully networked/smart cities.
The report argues the results point to a need to communicate better with the public and to secure IoT and smart city digital infrastructure with the latest generation of digital security solutions.
To download a copy of Circles of Trust 2023: Exploring Consumer Trust in the Digital Society, visit: https://utimaco.com/survey-how-trust-works-digital-world
For more information, visit: https://utimaco.com/
