Despite Privacy Concerns, Smart Speaker Owners Have Trust, Say NPR, Edison
Smart speaker users are concerned about privacy and hacking but trust the companies providing the technology, said Edison Research and NPR. About 58 percent of smart speaker owners worry hackers could be using their smart speaker to access their home…
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Export Compliance Daily combines U.S. export control news, foreign border import regulation and policy developments into a single daily information service that reliably informs its trade professional readers about important current issues affecting their operations.
or personal information, but 54 percent trust the companies that make smart speakers to keep their personal information secure. Tom Webster, Edison senior vice president, said last week on a webcast that a lot of smart speaker owners are “resigned to the fact everything is listening, everything is keylogging, getting our information all the time anyway -- so maybe this isn’t all that different.” Joel Sucherman, NPR vice president-new platform partnerships, said consumers’ willingness to trade off a certain amount of personal data is “an extension of a handshake agreement” to give up some privacy for “functionality that makes my life better.” He compared the compromise to smartphone owners' willingness to allow Google Maps “to know exactly where I am … because I can get there now.” Study participants interviewed in Los Angeles, St. Louis and Richmond, Virginia, showed little concern about trading privacy for smart speaker benefits. One respondent indicated resignation: “I feel like the world we live in right now, we don’t really have privacy. We may feel like we do, but we don’t.” Of smart speaker owners, 4 percent own a smart speaker with a screen only vs. 69 percent with audio only and 27 percent who owned both. Interest in video is growing in devices such as Amazon’s Echo Show and Google’s Home Hub, said Webster: Twenty-nine percent of smart speaker adopters showed interest in a screen-based device, twice that of non-smart speaker owners. Screen-based smart speakers are driving discovery and seen as easier to use, Webster said. NPR originally viewed smart speakers with displays as companion products to audio, said Sucherman, but as voice assistants are increasingly built into other devices, such as Amazon’s Fire TV, that will open opportunities for “pure video and other creative uses of visual and audio accompaniment.”