You can tell a lot about what's going on in a home from how much electricity it's using — especially when that information is collected every few minutes and recorded centrally. It's revealing enough that a federal judge has ruled that people with smart meters have a reasonable expectation of privacy and as such law enforcement will require a warrant to acquire that data.
It may sound like a niche win in the fight for digital privacy, and in a way it is, but it's still important. One of the risks we've assumed as consumers in adopting ubiquitous technology in forms like the so-called Internet of Things is that we are generating an immense amount of data we weren't before, and that data is not always protected as it should be.
This case is a great example. Traditional spinning meters are read perhaps once a month by your local utility, and at that level of granularity there's not much you can tell about a house or apartment other than whether perhaps someone has been living there and whether they have abnormally high electricity use — useful information if you were, say, looking for illicit pot growers with a farm in the basement.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:32PM (3 children)
If you have solar panels, you could be trying to hide the grow op in your house!
Or, you could move to a state that respects your personal freedoms and conducts itself with the fiscal responsibility necessary to not need bailouts from neighboring states. AKA, a Blue state.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:50PM (1 child)
Massachusetts tracks pot plants with helicopters [commonwealthmagazine.org]
Massachusetts cops raided an 81-year-old’s home to cut down a single medical marijuana plant [vox.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:14PM
Northampton (MA) dispensary gets go-ahead on recreational pot [gazettenet.com]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:54PM
But only moslem terrorists don't like pork!! You a turrist boy?
Fun fact, anyone who uses the "moslem" spelling is most likely from an immigrant Nazi family, or one of their pathetic lackeys, using it as a dog whistle. Timeline [writingexplained.org] which shows their diminishing influence over the years which explains why they're trying to do an end-run around Democracy. They just HATE the freedom to choose anything other than their murderous ideology.
#VLM #Ethanol-fueled #RunawaysGrandpa #Jmorris #unwittingKhallow #DrunkMightyBuzzard