I think you and others are minimizing what sophisticated signal analysis, tracking algorithms and followup ground-truthing (verifying at the source) of your household appliances might reveal about your activities.
I won’t construct any absurd possibilities but you can assume that it is, or soon will be, possible to monitor the operation of every electrical device in your house. You can joke about making popcorn and running a vacuum cleaner, but are you REALLY comfortable knowing that your private, household activities are being monitored and recorded on that level, and that at some point a police team could sweep in, analyze all your appliances for signatures and use the recorded power usage to recreate your minute-by-minute activities during an alleged crime period?
Just the same as now the police in many jurisdictions can retroactively reconstruct your driving path, to the second, from stored license plate tags?
That moaning you hear in the background is the Fourth Amendment on its death bed.
Connections such as this already exist in many forms. As benign as you might think a popup ad is, when you stop laughing, think about the chain of data from your microwave to your smartphone at another time and place, and you’ll understand why I say I fear government intrusion less than that of private companies.
Or even back it up a notch. Are you really comfortable with your searches being used to track you and shove privacy-invading ad content at you? It’s long since been more than just, say, Google-internal; the information is increasingly shared through private marketing database firms.
Since this would require probable cause and a court order, it doesn’t concern me any more than the prospect of them swooping in and searching my house for any other physical evidence of a crime. It is an unlikely probability that just doesn’t rise to the level of concern that it apparently does for you. I take comfort in the knowledge that if this information is being gathered on a hundred million households, I would have to be a pretty tall wildebeest for my head to stick up above the rest of the herd.
The alternative being what? Cease the development of all new information technology forever because it might make some hypothetical government intrusion slightly easier?
Ever see Minority Report? Advertising crawling all over every surface all the time everywhere you look . . . And, “Hello, Mr. Hashimoto! Would you like to look a another selection of tank tops?” That’s scary!
A firend of mine had rented out her house to someone who turned it into a pot farm. she said the electric bill was close to $4,000 per month. It drew no attention whats so ever until the tenant left and she discovered the operation.
I’ll go one step further and state that the paranoia exhibited in this thread by some concerns me more than someone feverishly watching my electric use and saying “OMG…from her Price Chopper credit card statement, she bought microwave popcorn and a Chicken Korma dinner…and I’m seeing an energy signature which matches the database record for her Samsung model 67551290BX microwave purchased last Boxing Day from Stan Kowalski at Best Buy…BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHICH ONE SHE’S COOKING! Quick, orient Satellite Bluebird 27a for a focused scan, and ready Strike Team Omega in case we have to intervene! LET’S MOVE, PEOPLE!!!”
A few years ago a pot growing operation was identified in Arkansas by excessive power consumption - or so it was reported. Maybe just misdirection. A drug bust is NEVER the result of a CI, but usually from a “routine traffic stop.” :rolleyes:
After a bit of digging, I have discovered that a great deal of work seems to have been done on developing a comprehensive policy, specification and roll out program for smart meters in the UK. It seems to be well thought out, covering most of the issues that worried me. The government is very anxious to win the confidence of the public on this. I suspect they have learnt from the legal challenges other governments have faced (eg in The Netherlands and in some US states. They are also quite keen to ensure that electricity and gas supply is competitive, so customers can switch suppliers and change billing plans. There will be a published standard specification for the smartmeter. Separate modules for the wide area network and a home area network and in home displays, microgeneration and connection to devices. It will require one very large network connecting 25million households and generate 128 Terabytes of data a year. Rollout seems to be starting next year.
I guess every developed economy is heading in the same direction and smart meters are the key to smart grids and managing energy consumption. They are taking security and privacy seriously, but this will be surely a tempting target. Hack the smartmeter and turn off the power?
I am hoping for the best, huge government programs like this do not have a good history. It ios also just part of the equation. As winter approaches, fuel poverty is serious issue. Having a nice smart meter to tell you cannot afford to heat your home is…cold comfort.
I guess in the US this sort of public policy will be down to individual states to decide how best to proceed? Or maybe it is more local than that?