Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How Smart Meters Invade Individual Privacy (smartgridawareness.org)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Residential utility customers have a legitimate expectation to preserve individual and behavioral privacy with regard to energy-related or water consumption data collected by the utility. Credible government reports and security experts have explained that there are privacy concerns that the granular data collected by smart meters will reveal the activities of people inside of a home by measuring their usage frequently over time. Furthermore, there is deep concern that inadequate cyber security measures surrounding the digital transmission of smart meter data will expose such data to misuse by authorized and unauthorized users of the data. Residential utility customers have currently only surrendered a privacy interest to the extent necessary to account for monthly billing by the utility, unless otherwise explicitly granted. Normally, only one energy or water usage measurement per month is necessary for the billing process.

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[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

The only real concern I could see with these is a nefarious actor having access to your real-time usage to determine your habits. I guess the argument can be made that the POCO is spying on you, but I really don’t see a benefit to them knowing your usage aside from network/grid management. Perhaps a locality can use this data to determine if you’re growing weed, but other than that, in a world where all of our information is harvested anyway, it seems pretty inconsequential to me. if you’re that concerned, get a solar/battery system and turn off your main breaker.

That, and be able to adjust billing to surges.

The secondary concern is reading the real-time usage by a nefarious actor, which has proven to be useful to ML applications for intuiting what types of activities are happening on the circuit. Obviously this pales in comparison to the potential abuse allowed by smart NICs and modems, but as a secondary measure or where a user is obscuring their network activity with encryption or similar, a real-time power reading would be helpful too.

It's just another vector that enables possible abuse, and one that you don't have any choice over. My utility installed one of these on my house this year and we were not given any choice.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

It's important to remember that POCOs are highly regulated, and they're not allowed to frivolously charge whatever they feel like, even in high demand conditions (probably state-dependent, but that's at least the case here in CA).

ML applications
What do you mean by that?

And I see where you're coming from. At this point in the world, where just about every data point about a person/household is tabulated and used in ways to coerce you to spend more money, I just feel like this is low on the priority scale. The utilities' motivation for smart meters is mostly labor cost reduction (meter readers). The remainder is real time grid load monitoring and statistics that better enables them to manage surge generation to keep costs down. This comes from a family friend that's a higher up in SoCal Edison. They legit don't care if someone is using an industrial grade sex machine or growing weed (though the municipality might). The biggest issue I can see with this, like anything else and as you alluded to, is data security/privacy.