Companies marketing connected devices to consumers should remember one point: the less complicated the better. This was a key point echoed repeatedly during a recent session at Data Innovation Day.

Consumers gravitate toward the simple and convenient, as well as products that ensure privacy and security. Connected devices that can provide these attributes, while also presenting the connectivity promised by the Internet of Things will prove invaluable to consumers and profitable to tech companies.

Simplicity rules

The average consumer isn't complicated when it comes to what he or she wants. In fact, the use cases for connected devices that interest consumers the most are actually really simple, said Philip DesAutels, senior director of IoT with The Linux Foundation.

"I want to know when someone's at my front door, I want to know what song is playing, I want to be able to drive away and tell my house to go into away mode," he said.

For example, a company that uses new technology to make connected electrical water heaters found that their customers were buying the devices and connecting them to currently installed gas water heaters.

The customers were then querying the smart meter in their houses to find which times of day electricity is cheaper than gas, and vice versa. They would use this information to program which times during the day the devices would "click on" and use either gas or electricity.

"Well, that's beautiful," said DesAutels. "That's big data, that's little data, it's spot pricing. It's all of that together, and it's a real-world scenario that's real money and a simple, simple scenario. I don't have to do anything after [setting up the device], I just tell it to negotiate with the cloud and leave me alone."

Plug-and-play convenience

For companies to market their products' simplicity, it's easier if they remember that most consumers aren't tech wizards. And consumers shouldn't have to be to make things work anyway, reminded Mohamad Foustok, CTO of BlueMaestro. Devices should be able to work as intended, out of the box.

If the device doesn't do that, it could be considered a failure.

"The general consumer is not a computer scientist, they're not an electronics engineer," said Foustok. "Setup and configuration, all of those things have to go away."

Companies producing connected products should keep in mind the old plug-and-play concept, and apply it to everything. But there are obstacles to achieving that type of convenience.

At the 2015 International Consumer Electronics Show, one of the things that was made clear was that there are far too many players in the field right now, he noted. And that means far too many competing standards.

The industry is going to have to go through a weeding-out process to end up with one or two companies that are working toward some concept of standardization. Without standardization, it's going to be difficult for the industry to achieve that plug-and-play simplicity that most consumers will want, Foustok noted.

Privacy issues

Things can connect much faster when they can connect directly, and that is very powerful, warned William Jeffries, the founding officer with Heat Seek NYC.

"Previously when you wanted to interact with technology you opened a box and typed into it," said Jeffries. "It was input/output and very conscious."

Now a user or consumer can easily lose track of the information he or she is putting out there. To explain his point, he mentioned his company, Heat Seek NYC.

In old cities like New York, there are many buildings that are outfitted with old-style steam heat. It's difficult to determine which building units are operating at safe temperatures because there's no data. In response, rather than have tenants manually log the temperature of their units to use as evidence, Heat Seek NYC has automated the process by using the Internet of Things.

Sensors placed in the apartment units take temperature readings to determine if landlords are in violation of housing codes. The information is then sent to the proper government agencies that can then enforce the appropriate housing codes.

The information can also be sent to and used by the landlords themselves when ensuring compliance. And although the use of this data is all well and good, it gets into the issue of privacy, he said.

"You're talking about putting something in someone else's home and collecting data from it and essentially giving it to other people," he noted. "The same thing applies to wearables like the Fitbit in your pocket, or the step tracker in your shoe … That information in the wrong hands can be scary."

Security pitfalls

Such privacy worries call for fine-grained privacy controls. These controls create the mechanisms that allow users to begin making conscious decisions about what of their information is protected and what isn't.

According to Foustok, before companies can offer privacy controls, they must first acknowledge that casual users may not know what personal information needs protecting.

"The consumer base has to understand how these things will help them … [and] this all has to happen in the next few years," he said.

DesAutels recanted the story about how his device alerted him to the fact that an app was tracking his location. Once alerted, he deactivated the app, but was astonished that such an occurrence had sneaked by him.

"I'm pretty tech-savvy, and I didn't realize that app had done that," he lamented. In the end, it was the interface for his apps' control unit that chose to expose the threat.

When it comes to security, companies should focus on both education and conscious design "to make sure people get the right information," DesAutels said.

Value of data

Foustok added another warning, reminding that security can come at a price. Companies have to be careful with securing connected devices, as adding too much can make them harder to operate and thus erase the simplicity and convenience consumers want.

"We have to start classifying data based on its value," then apply the appropriate level of security for that value, Foustok added.

Aurelia Moser, a map scientist with CartoDB, concluded by saying, "People really don't know how their data could be used."

Moser noted that for years, users have been willingly providing social media entities like Facebook with personal data without even realizing. No one really thinks about that when they log into Facebook.

"So it's really hard to establish those hierarchies [that quantify the value of data], or even to define what privacy and security is reasonable as a standard for everyone," she said.

However, if a consumer is appeased with the simplicity and ultimate comfort connected devices provide, satisfaction may ultimately outweigh any security paranoia.