Trust fall
By Ken Showers, Managing Editor
Updated 3:59 AM CST, Wed November 29, 2023
Do you trust tech companies to protect and secure your personal privacy? According to one survey, it appears that a majority of smart home technology users do.
Now I am writing this way too late into the evening, the post-holiday doldrums make for slow or quiet news weeks. So, while I’m brainstorming a topic for this week’s blog and sending some post witching hour emails, I began reading some survey data from an article. It’s not new data, the article is a few months old now, but the data makes me pause and read it again. 65% of smart home security users have a high amount of trust in tech companies to protect their personal privacy.
Huh.
Maybe I’m just jaded, or maybe it’s the result of having a number of friends in the echelons of the tech industry, but I wouldn’t offer that amount of trust on any given day. I am a pessimist through and through of course, but when phones are always eavesdropping on us to tailor advertisements for users I can’t pretend otherwise.
Heck, there are plenty of companies that ARE trying to protect your data because that’s the service they’re selling, and I’m not sure I trust them to protect data because I’m not sure they CAN, like the NortonLifeLock breach earlier this year. I spent the weekend reading about yet another series of hospitals experiencing service disruptions from cyber-attacks and my first thought in that scenario is always, did they pay?
Because several companies that have taken a stand against the blackmailing tactics of ransomware gangs have found them making good on their threats and exposing company data very much in the public eye, along with private user data as well. If you remember the BlackCat ransomware gang that’s been in vogue of late, well, they have been using the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)’s incident reporting rules to pressure companies into negotiating their ransoms.
65% trust? Residential smart home security system users have a lot of faith, and I hope the security industry is poised to catch them when they fall.
But who’s going to catch them?
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