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chromas (from IRC) writes:

TechCrunch:

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.

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