{"id":257789,"date":"2026-05-28T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T10:10:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T14:10:12","slug":"smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/","title":{"rendered":"Smart Homes Won\u2019t Scale Until The Privacy Problem Is Fixed"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/garydrenik\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/\">Smart Homes Won\u2019t Scale Until The Privacy Problem Is Fixed<\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/garydrenik\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/\">https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/garydrenik\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Publish Date: <a href=\"publish_date]\">2026-05-28 10:00:00<\/a><\/p>\n<p>Source Domain: <a href=\"www.forbes.com\">www.forbes.com<\/a><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"-webkit-line-clamp:2\" class=\"Ccg9Ib-7 _8XF2kHYM\">Smart Home Technology<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Getty Images &#8211; Issarawat Tattong<\/p>\n<p>For years, smart home technology promised lower energy bills, improved security and homes that adapt automatically to the people inside them. But despite steady improvements in AI and automation, adoption lagged industry expectations and has begun to slow. The reason isn\u2019t hard to identify. Consumers are increasingly weary that smart home devices come with hidden tradeoffs like invasive data collection, questionable data sharing practices, and cybersecurity risks.<\/p>\n<p>The challenge facing smart homes isn\u2019t technological readiness, but consumer trust. Without trust, even the most advanced connected technology stalls at the point of adoption.<\/p>\n<p>According to a recent survey from my company, Prosper Insights &#038; Analytics, fewer than half of U.S. adults agreed that Amazon\u2019s Alexa or Google Assistant feels \u201clike a friend.\u201d That skepticism is reinforced by a steady drumbeat of headlines, like Amazon removing key privacy settings, Google continuing to collect data from discontinued devices and ongoing regulatory scrutiny of Meta\u2019s data practices. <\/p>\n<p><span style=\"-webkit-line-clamp:2\" class=\"Ccg9Ib-7 _8XF2kHYM\">Prosper &#8211; Alexa and Google Assistant Like A Friend<\/span><\/p>\n<p>Prosper Insights &#038; Analytics<\/p>\n<p>The message consumers are absorbing is simple \u2013 smart home devices collect more data than they should, share it more widely than people expect and offer too little visibility into what happens after installation. Whether that perception is always fair doesn\u2019t matter. That perception shapes behavior, and right now, it\u2019s suppressing adoption.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSmart home technology has reached a reckoning point,\u201d said Brendon O\u2019Toole, vice president smart home and energy management for Copeland. \u201cCompanies can treat privacy as a design constraint to be optimized away or as a foundational requirement for growth, but only one of those paths allows the category to scale in a meaningful way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>The Transparency Gap<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Smart home manufacturers nearly always disclose privacy information, but it\u2019s often buried&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/garydrenik\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/\">Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Smart Homes Won\u2019t Scale Until The Privacy Problem Is Fixed https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/garydrenik\/2026\/05\/28\/smart-homes-wont-scale-until-the-privacy-problem-is-fixed\/ Publish Date: 2026-05-28 10:00:00&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":257790,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/imageio.forbes.com\/specials-images\/imageserve\/6a1074637b54ddb65a1ade84\/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-257789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-privacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257789"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257789"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257791,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257789\/revisions\/257791"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}