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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @05:53PM (6 children)
smart meters are acctually for "dumb people" and must be a running joke around the water cooler at the electricity company.
it is miserable how many parameters can be monitored with these devices and allows just as many parameters to creatively show up on your future bill.
i personally feel the only benefit it provides is to be able to apply for "time of use". day time -vs- night time usage.
everything else will be the foundation of shenenigans to gauge the ...uhm... electricity user.
also somebody should run a time accelerated test to see if the spinning wheel or dumb meter lasts longer...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:04PM (4 children)
Agreed, but they also have the very practical benefit of them being able to read most meters just by driving down the street.
I would like to get all these smart devices out of our lives, this new age of no privacy is detrimental to the human psyche.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 23 2018, @06:40PM (3 children)
It would be easier for the electric utilities if they could simply google your electric meter usage. Then the police might not need a warrant to google your electricity usage? It would be possible for both the electric utility and the police to gather electric meter data without putting down their donut.
Why shouldn't smart meters have internet cloud connections like all other modern insecure IoT devices?
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:06PM (2 children)
I wasn't arguing they are a good thing, just that there are practical upsides apart from micro-billing.
Y'know, I have never visited a sandwich shop that would charge you less if you came after the lunch rush. Power companies should not be able to charge more for different times of the day. What validation is there for charging more when they are selling more??? Probably just some MBA asshole who never progressed past simple supply-demand graphs in econ, and then someone else realized they could get away with the asshat's idea because they effectively have a monopoly!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Thursday August 23 2018, @07:16PM (1 child)
I would tend to agree in principle.
The reason both the sandwich shop and the power company SHOULD charge more during peak demand is because of that free market supply and demand thingy.
But there's something much more important at stake. In the sandwich shop case, if the staff cannot keep up with the line, people will get frustrated and leave. No babies die. Very few animals are molested. Etc. Not a major crisis.
In the case of the electric utility, if demand exceeds their capacity to generate, everything will go dark. Troll's screens go dark, making mom's basement totally dark. Major crisis. People have to wash dishes the old fashioned way . . . if any of the population remembers how this was done.
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @11:33PM
I have never once in my life heard someone say "Oh I can't do that now I want to wait until non-peak usage time."
It is just a way to suck up money, and the supply / demand thing makes sense when you consider the costs of bulk production vs. small scale. If you have only a few customers then you must charge high rates for your product to cover costs. In most markets this works out pretty well because if a business makes efficiency gains they can charge the same rate as their competitors and get extra profit. If they raise their prices they will lose customers, and once other businesses figure out the same efficiency gains then they will undercut the first business. This keeps the prices in check with reality.
For energy markets there is basically zero competition, and a lot of MBAs figured out they could use that same supply/demand basic logic to just screw the customers. Just because you can do something doesn't make it right, and sadly with power companies their monopoly insulates them from the consequences of being bad.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 23 2018, @09:17PM
there's a argument to be made for more monitoring. it should lead to a more stable grid and sinking costs.
modern reality however, mostly swings the other way. blame it on shareholder value or whatnot, but the "so-called" improvments mostly lead to more cost\profit.
"modern wording" should be a masters degree. it is amazing how PR and SPIN has shaped the last 20 years.
if we had the tech of today but in the more honest times that existed 20 years ago and would apply the so worded benefits of smart metering, the solution would have been implemented once and then correctly at the transformer level.
the grid would be monitored better and the grid would be more stable... bht it would not have allowed to oh-so-conviniently suck money out of the consumers pocket.
ofc, no doubt about it, the extra profit will just finance more complaint suppression and even PR for even more smartness (of the money sucking grid).