Smart Grid Could Pose Threat To Privacy

Presto Vivace writes "Brian Krebs of the Washington Post reports on a study jointly released Tuesday by the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner and the Future of Privacy Forum. It seems that in the process of collecting all that feedback about energy use, utility companies will inevitably collect a great deal of information about us. From the article: 'Instead of measuring energy use at the end of each billing period, smart meters will provide this information at much shorter intervals, the report notes. Even if electricity use is not recorded minute by minute, or at the appliance level, information may be gleaned from ongoing monitoring of electricity consumption such as the approximate number of occupants, when they are present, as well as when they are awake or asleep. For many, this will resonate as a "sanctity of the home" issue, where such intimate details of daily life should not be accessible.'"

Comments

Re:Kyllo

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

I would think that the use of electricity usage data should play out the same way, but who knows!

I knows!
Granting warrants for excessive electricity use is routine in the USA.

Here's one from 2004: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0330044pot1.html
Here's one from 2009: http://hamptonroads.com/node/510056

My CA townhouse got "smartmetered" last week.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

PG&E is using (for electricity) a GE I-120 smartmeter with a Silver Spring Networks interface. (Installer said they plan to install the associated network on the poles shortly, after which no more meter readers wandering the neighborhood.)

According to the meter's description on GE's site it uses IP and "industry standard crypto" over a two way radio link to a network running their software. It can be remotely tweaked and have software upgrades remotely loaded. (I can hear the cypherpunks booting up already.)

It records and reports high-time-resolution information about the utility use. It can be used to shut the power off in case of "billing trouble". It doesn't do net metering. Instead it treats backfeeding the net as a sign of cheating - an old mechanical-meter hack consisting of unplugging and inverting the meter to "run it backward" a few days per month. (It records the events around the reversal - unplug, replug-inverted, unplug, replug-normal - with high time resolution, to be used as evidence if it goes to court.)

If you want to do net metering once this is installed you have to get the power company to come out again and install another meter, set up for "two-way metering".

Re:My CA townhouse got "smartmetered" last week.

[Anonymous Coward]

They actually use native IPv6 with IPSEC for all of the Smart Meters on their own private wireless and fiber backbones. For some of the nodes that cannot use local wireless reach a substation (remote, non-urban areas), they use VZN's cellular network, with IPv6 encapsulated in IPv4 to the SSN network container where it comes out IPv6 to talk to the rest of the infrastructure.

However, PG&E doesn't host any of the infrastructure, they outsource it all to Silver Springs. So, not only does PG&E have all this info on you, so does SSN.

All utilities to date, except for mine, outsource the data warehousing to SSN. I worked on the implementation of my local utility (doing the fiber to all the substations for this AMI network), and my utility was SSN's first customer who was going to not use them for hosting it all.

While utilities can monitoring you down to the many times per minute (I don't recall the stats, perhaps as often as a second), they don't have room to store that much data. All they really need is to get is the data at the time the rate changes (morning, evening, night, whatever). However, all of that can be buffered in the meter for a good long time (it's just a bunch of numbers and timestamps anyway).

Someone wanting to know what was going on at your house would be better to watch the internet there and your credit/debit cards purchases.

Alberta Court of Appeal disagreed with you

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.law.ualberta.ca/centres/ccs/news/?id=332

"The Drug Unit asked Enmax, the local electricity provider, to install a digital recording ammeter (DRA) to record power consumption in Gomboc’s house. Enmax complied without insisting on a warrant. After five days, Enmax gave the police a graph that showed Gomboc’s use of electricity was consistent with running a grow operation. [...] At trial, the Crown conceded that police could not have obtained a search warrant without the data from Enmax."

So, at least in Canada, not only has someone already been subject to a search warrant over electrical usage but the appeals court has ruled it is legal to base a search warrant on someone's electrical usage.

Oh bullshit

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Just use an uninterrupted power supply system. It can be built to draw current only when the batteries are low, and that can be programmed in, so that the actual draw of electricity is orthogonal to the use of the electricity. Think kind of like a Prius.

bunch of arm-waving idiocy.

Re:Kyllo

[Anonymous Coward]

I use to keep saltwater reef aquariums. I even used "grow lights" over them. In the hobby we hear about people getting their doors kicked in at 6am on a Sunday from time to time... Seems a reef tank needs light 12 hours a day just like...

The story that you reference, I wonder if the cops kicked out all the drywall while they inspected. I've heard of that and there's no compensation.

Re:Oh no

[maharb]

I think his point is that leases are meant to be broken on occasion in a no harm, no foul sort of way. If you have ever read an apartment lease I am guessing you would know that nearly everyone violates an apartment lease from the day they move in. The problem is that the complex needs to protect itself, so they must write the lease in absolute terms so that they can act when a real issue is going on. This prevents many clauses from being removed yet produces many violations that are "false positives" of the intended purpose. Now I would say that the free market would weed out the landlords that try this pretty fast but it would still be shitty to get stuck with one for a whole year if you didn't do your research.

I am saying this as a landlord. Maybe I am too reasonable because I lease to people my age and understand what is going to happen =/

Re:Your privacy is already gone.

[geekoid]

No it's not. You don't ahve any privacy in public, and you never have had privacy while in public.

Privacy is bank info, medical info, what happens in your house and in PRIVATE.