The promise was to help you control your electricity bill by becoming more aware of your energy use. The downside is that with the data gathered, other people and businesses can also become more aware of your habits, like when you go to work, go on vacation, etc. Is the potential energy savings worth the invasion of privacy trade-off? I sure don’t think so. I really don’t want PG&E or anyone else for that matter knowing how I live my life inside my own home.
To add insult to injury, the Public Utility Commission just granted PG&E a rate hike to pay for lost profits due to these devices that no consumers asked for. In my own conversion experience, PG&E basically said “our way or the highway” – I didn’t have a choice. Now I have a ZigBee WiFi capable datalogger on the side of my house, tracking my family’s habits. Now the EFF is getting involved for privacy protection. Fortunately, the PUC has now ordered PG&E to provide an opt-out plan. With privacy issues rising, there may be more takers now.
From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
California Proposes Strong Privacy Protections for “Smart Meters”
The California Public Utilities Commission (PUC) has released a proposal for strong privacy protections for “smart meter” data, closely following the recommendations from EFF and the Center for Democracy and Technology. If adopted and finalized, the plan could become a model for how to protect sensitive consumer information while providing new ways to save energy.
California’s PG&E is currently in the process of installing “smart meters” that will collect detailed data of energy use —750 to 3000 data points per month per household—for every energy customer in the state. These meters are aimed at helping consumers monitor and control their energy usage, but the information that is collected can reveal much more about a household’s daily activities: when people wake up, when they come home, when they go on vacation, and maybe even when they take a hot bath.
Many third parties will want access to this sensitive information, and the California PUC has recommended strong protections for the transfer of the data to others. This should help prevent the data’s misuse, hopefully blocking new intrusions into our home and private life. We hope the California PUC goes on to adopt its proposal, creating a blueprint for energy data and privacy protection that can be used across the country.
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If only we had an opt-out option here in Texas :/
Not to mention the ultimate goal: to turn off you appliances whenever they want to reduce energy consumption!
They are too wrapped up in green energy to build the needed capacity to not have to do this.
This lunatic scheme is a data protection nightmare.
It is also part of the control grid that they are trying to implement.
One day they may ration electricity and use these meters to implement the rationing plan.
Not to mention the ultimate goal: to turn off you appliances whenever they want to reduce energy consumption!
They are too wrapped up in green energy to build the needed capacity to not have to do this.
Of course the rich will avoid this by having local battery backup for the outages – just like they do in the third world! (Thanks Envoro twits!)
Thanks
JK
Not at all. They are to allow the state to control your energy usage. Want to wash your clothes before 9 pm? Sorry, that circuit only will be allowed power from 9pm to 6am. Smart meters are a
watermeloncontrol-freaks dream.As we have seen, it is impossible for corporations to protect our data. My data has been given to the wrong party by my Bank, my employer has exposed my personal information by accident, and the “cloud” has turned out to be just a huge shopping mall for hackers. The smart meters just cost us more money and exposure to government and other idiots. What we need is to drill for more oil, build nuclear plants, and persue other cost effective energy sources. If we have energy, we don’t need no stinkin’ smart meter.
If “these meters are aimed at helping consumers monitor and control their energy usage” then why not have local access only? If the customer chooses to share the data then that’s fine – if not, no problem.
A simple alternative would be to have an electronic meter with a simple digital readout of kilowatt hours and a three digit hash code but no radio. The customer could simply call in the energy and hash numbers to a pge computer over the phone or internet. The three digit hash would prevent made up or erroneous meter readings and would not contain enough data capacity to leak any significant private info. Customers who are frequently late in calling in their meter reading could be forced to switch to a meter with a radio or pay a fee for human reader visits. This system would be nearly as cheap as the new ones with radios.
There are bigger problems. It’s not just whether you can control your electricity but also whether anyone else can, and what they might do with any data gathered.
Silver Spring has a paper about their system security which mentions it’s designed to be secure, but not necessarily secure from the outset. There’s already an open source tool kit designed to work with the ZigBee chipset and could be used to exploit it. That’s been available for some time now but I don’t know if it’s actively being attacked yet. If it is, upgrades may be needed sooner than anticipated and if the comms elements are embedded, may require meter replacements to avoid ‘smart’ meters becoming rather dumb meters.
Sorry if this is a dumb question from a foreigner. But if the supposed benefit is that consumers can get to see and analyze their power usage over time, why does this info need to be sent to a central authority? Virtually every home has a reasonably good wireless enabled computer, smart phone or other number crunching device that could link to a meter… so why are the smart meters not producing secure information *only* for those who are using them???
Why does this central authority need any more info than load demands?
…useful information for burglars too.
Time-of-Use pricing/metering is just around the corner too, with these meters in place …
Oh joy; there goes the benefit of having an instant hot-water heater …
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The UK are going to ‘benefit’ from this type of meter as well but you can bet your life that we won’t be offered any kind of privacy protection. What’s more I expect that they’ll be used to control the rolling brown-outs which we’ll probably face once the government shuts all the coal fire power stations to comply with the an insane EU directive on power station emissions.
has recommended strong protections for the transfer of the data to others
Yes, and 100 million Sony users thought their data was safe too!
These “green” meters are a dangerous slippery slope that I shall stay off for as long as possible.
Gee. Who could have seen this coming.
Anthony, smart metering is just about monitoring your usage, and cost saving, it’s also an opportunity to ration energy which not doubt has Monbiot in the UK salivating. Imagine, if the greens persuade the government to allow a fixed amount of energy per person, and they will if they can, the energy companies can monitor your usage and when you exceed your allowance, no matter how it’s set, can cut off your energy. It’s not just its privacy implications, there are tyranny implications while we have environmentalists around.
They may bend to the public’s insistence for privacy considerations now, but rest assured, this train will keep running.
The ultimate goal is higher rates for less usage. Who wouldn’t want to use less energy and save money? But when usage “drops,” rates will increase in the name of funding “green energy.”
California, Spain, Germany, and the Dutch know this all too well.
Promises of privacy protection and secure data are continually found to be hollow.
How many times have we heard that “your privacy is important to us, and we don’t supply this data to third parties…blah, blah, blah…” Then, a year later, a little news blurb about how someone hacked into the system and stole the data. Or how the data was stored on a 3rd party server, and that 3rd party sold the data…
“The dastardly 3rd party sold the data..not us. We’re innocent. We didn’t think they’d do it. This is horrible, and we will take measures to insure this won’t happen again. ”
That’s what they’ll tell us, but it’s too late. The deed is done.
If the entire premise of smart meters was to make us more efficient, and use less energy, then why raise the rates? Why not save the time and expense of the smart meter system and …just raise the rates? Exact same result.
This ranks with putting a GPS device on your car that not only logs how many miles you drive, how fast you drive each of those miles, but upon which road you travel upon…The goal being to tax you on miles driven, tax you on how fast you drive, and tax you based on which roads you’re driving on.
Just like a smart meter, and every bit as invasive of privacy.
I have my own “smart meter” CALLED MY FINGER…….TURN OFF LIGHT-SAVE MONEY????Wounder if I can get a government grant to study this concept?
Not to mention that, here in Texas, the smart meters were touted as a way to ‘reduce metering costs’ when in reality it just made it easier for the electric company to bill me. My ‘meter reading fee’ stayed the same, but the electric company can rid itself of a few meter readers since that job is considerably easier.
As far as I know, there is now way yet for the power company to kill or even control individual electrical circuits in your household with just a ‘smart’ meter. However, the ultimate goal will be to raise rates for larger utility users.
Although I do like the idea of using the SmartMeter against the control-freak whackjobs. Some kindly hacker with a bit of time could quietly and slowly reduce everyone’s “consumption” by corrupting the readings down slightly over time. A bit like the bank or trader who makes money on the Nth decimal place in exchange rates. The power companies wouldn’t even notice it most likely.
I had one of these damn things installed on my house from SDG&E not too long ago.
I can see these things being used some day to control how much energy we use.
Smart Meters. A tax on Mileage. A Carbon tax. Illegal Incandescents. Subsidized Bird-Dicers. I like the pattern that is developing.
We had them installed in Melbourne over the last few years. Their primary purpose is to allow the remote shutdown of households power. Here in Victoria, our population has doubled, while left and right governments have not built one new power station (or dam) for decades. And they dont plan on building any. The governments know (and I believe they planned this), that in a few years time, peak demand during summer will greatly outstrip supply. It already happens in Melbourne on the 2 or 3 very hottest days of the years, where there are power shortages and entire suburbs are shut down to stop the whole grid going down.
Smart meters will allow the government to remotely shut power to every 4th or 5th (eg) house for 1 or 2 hours at a time, and then rorate through the other houses. The effect is that they reduce (force) down demand by enough to keep the system overloading.
Currently, entire suburbs are shut down for the whole day via manual tripping of massive breakers. This way, they will be able to cut power to everyone for a short period in alternating cycles, so that the effects are minimal (eg your fridge wont go off if it`s off for one hour once or twice a day)
This is the real purpose of Smart Meters – to manage our transition back to 2nd world living standards.
How about covering the thing with aluminum foil to block the RF signal?