The research, undertaken by IT security solutions provider Utimaco, found that while societies are becoming increasingly digitally connected, there remains a lack of trust in IoT security.
Only 14% of users considered ‘smart devices’ to be secure, despite 38% saying they use them. Utimaco argues this highlights the need for more education from industry into how smart devices are secured.
The new whitepaper, ‘Circles of Trust 2023: Exploring Consumer Trust in the Digital Society’, explores how consumers view trust in an increasingly digital world. The 2023 survey expanded the geographical scope from Germany, Spain and United Kingdom to include thousands of consumers from Mexico, USA and Singapore.
IoT, or ‘smart technology’, is expected to grow to $662 billion in 2023, encompassing a wide range of technologies from next-generation robotics systems in factories to smart light bulbs.
The research found several serious stumbling blocks to widespread trust of IoT technology among consumers.
Only 24% believe that they’d be able to define the term ‘Internet of Things’, indicating that this is 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 that they could define the term (33%) while the UK had the lowest (20%).
This pattern repeated when consumers were asked if they used IoT technology (26% globally said that they did), but when asked the same question using the term ‘smart technology’ that number jumped to 38%.
Also, when asked if they used specific IoT/Smart devices, the research found that the majority of those surveyed across all countries used at least one type of smart device: 61% owned a Smart TV and 52% used a virtual assistant like Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home.
On the topic of smart cities, only a minority (31%) felt confident that they could define the term and general enthusiasm was quite muted. While only 12% of consumers saw no advantages to smart cities, the most popular smart city innovation, intelligent traffic control, only saw 47% global approval.
The report argues that these results point to a need to communicate better with the general public, and to secure IoT and smart city digital infrastructure with the latest generation of digital security solutions.
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