Smart Homes and the Promise of Safety

Amazon has filed new patents that would enable its Ring doorbell-camera hybrid to identify and categorize people by their "faces, retinas, irises, skin texture, gait, voices, and even odor" according to reporting by Insider. On the one hand, this further opens the door to harassment and the creation of an even more widespread civil surveillance network due to Amazon's policy of letting users of their Neighbors app disseminate recorded footage to police and security firms without scrutiny. On the other hand, these patents, if put into commission and correctly monitored, might improve home security, at least for smart home evangelists. The demand for more security in smart homes seems to be there already, as our chart with data from our Statista Digital Market Outlook shows.

While household penetration for the aforementioned products and motion detectors has been as low as 0.2 percent in 2017, modeling by Statista research experts predicts extensive growth in the coming years. By 2023, approximately 4.3 percent of households worldwide might have a smart security camera installed, and roughly 3.2 percent of households might utilize smart locks with IoT functionality. The growth predictions from 2023 to 2026 are even higher: In security cameras, Statista researchers predict a jump in penetration rate of 2.8 percent, while smart lock implementation is expected to rise by 2.2 percent in this timeframe. The sore loser in this equation: Motion detectors, which are predicted to be installed in 1.7 percent of households in 2026 after a total growth of 1.5 percent since 2017.

In 2020, revenue with smart home security products was predicted to hit more than $8.5 billion in the U.S., China, Japan, South Korea and the UK combined, which would amount to about 20 percent of the predicted $44 billion total worldwide revenue with smart home devices in 2020 proposed Strategy Analytics.