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Is Your Electricity Meter Spying On You?
lee1 writes "If you have a 'smart meter,' it is collecting data that can reveal when you wake up, when you leave for work and come home, when you go on vacation and when you take a shower. This data is commercially valuable and, if sold to third parties, can lead to privacy invasion on a massive scale. The California Public Utility Commission is reacting to the gas and electric company's mass installation of these meters with new proposals for strong privacy protections."
These are what keep us SAFE because it lets power companies notify law enforcement when our neighbors are growing marijuana! We NEED these to keep us SAFE!
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
People need to realize that any device that can collect and transmit data will probably be used to collect more data than they should. That data will PROBABLY end up being sold, simply because people are willing to pay for it. Since it is our data, why can't we demand a cut of the profits?
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
If they aren't protected with strong security, and thieves can extract the information, it's as good as people posting all that information on Facebook or similar.
I seem to be the only person not allowed to collect data from the smart meter on my house. I have allow Google to collect the data for me or I can't access it at all.
This is getting ridiculous. Half the posts on /. are "Oh noes, companies can find out when I X!" If companies want that information, they'll just look at your Facebook account, where you posted pictures of your office, your cat, check-in data at the porn store up on the corner, and links to your YouTube video of your marijuana plants for all the world to see. We cannot simultaneously be a society that wants to share everything and keep everything secret.
is signalling the CIA
We told you not to go and load Debian on it, but would you listen? No, of course not.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
The lesson here: any data that is collectable will be collected. Any data that is usable will be used.
It would be entirely naive to think that law enforcement would restrain themselves from using data that is right there for the taking. All it takes is a little strong-arming of the company in charge of the data.
That includes consumption of electricity, water, gas, internet, cable-tv, UPS-deliveries, and anything else someone else pumps into your house.
No, attitudes on privacy aren't diverging. You're just misrepresenting them.
I post on Facebook what I choose to post. Therefore, Facebook posts are not a privacy violation (unless they ignore my privacy settings) because the act of making those posts was an act of explicit consent to share that information with the people I chose to share it with. Yes, stupid people will post stupid things that allow others to invade their privacy, but you can't legislate away stupidity.
By contrast, I don't choose what information my water meter collects. Therefore, the water company should not be allowed to disclose any information that it collects. Similarly, Facebook should not be allowed to disclose anything that I don't explicitly allow them to disclose. And so on.
Disclosure of private information should require explicit consent. The deeper you hide that consent in some service agreement, the bigger the privacy violation you're committing. Simple as that.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I may be remembering incorrectly, but it seems to me that I remember the California Public Utilities Commission pushing the utilities to install these. If that is correct, why did they wait until now to investigate the privacy implications? Wouldn't the correct time to have investigated the privacy implications been before you pushed the utilities to install these all over the place? I do know that when these were first introduced there were a lot of people asking these very questions.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I've worked for a firm that collects this data. The technology, as it's exists now, is incapable of the level of analysis described. The data is flow is massive and only summation for billing is viable. Even then, "sanitization" of data is common practices. While protective legislation and guidance is encouraged before it goes too far, there are far greater violations including IP address mapping between logins on identifying solutions (gmail, yahoo mail) and apparent "anonymous" sites. Flash Persisted Objects being one aspect, IP + browser fingerprinting, and collaboration between marketing organizations and online retailers are bigger risks. The part that sucks is we can't opt out of smart metering. Security is quite solid but if I had any advice to the PUCs it would be to mandate truck roles for power turn off / turn down. The current broadcast model on smart meters combined with the potential to brute force the master key for broadcasting means someone with a bit of knowledge and desire could inject into the meshed network a flag to shut down broad swaths of power consumers, which in turn could lead to a surge back into the grid causing other catastrophic outages. GM72
It's actually pretty easy to generate an appliance profile for a house and figure out which appliances are on at any given time, even for loads as low as 10W. Considering the time delays between running around to every device in your house, it's also possible to figure out in what order the appliances were turned on! Relevant papers: http://seclab.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/BergmanJJTGW11.pdf http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MPRV.2010.71
I hear google is starting a new service where you get your electricity for free, but they get to keep all the usage data and do whatever they want with it. As a first test of the utility of this they are modeling when people are home and when they are not, then door-to-door sales organizations get to participate in an auction to buy time segments of people at home. Rumor has it that the Girl Scouts and the Jehovah's Witnesses were having a bidding war for your house at 6:45-7:15 PM next tuesday. Next they will target your computer with ads for porn when you are using the laptop after 11PM and the wife has set her alarm earlier than 7AM and turned off the upstairs lights. Other applications to follow.
Ok, ok, i just made that up.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
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it's the unscrupulous folks who claim they're from the electric co. to read your meter
The meter is outside... And any modern utility has long since put distance readable meters so the techs don't even need to be in your yard...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
In the U.S. your employer probably pays most of your health insurance premium. Maybe he can get a better deal with the insurance company if he fires people whose personal habits match a profile that leads to higher health insurance claims.
Yes.
Sorry, did you envision that all this data is just for sale to 'Trusted Persons' ? They won't be strangers, they will be customers!
Smart metering should reduce power costs and consumption, not increase it.
Welcome to the exponential part of the population growth curve, where it doesn't matter what you do, there are no longer enough resources to go around.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
There are more than enough resources to go around. It simply isn't economical to go after most of them right now, but it will become so.
"Like odors, IR leaking into the public domain needs no warrant."
Nope. An infrared scan constitutes a search. They would have to get a warrant, first, in order to do the thermal imaging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
I don't know why you would expect that.
These are drug warrants we're talking about. The cops like to use their fancy SWAT toys, and they love no-knock warrants.
You're not going to get a polite detective knocking, you're going to get 20 cops breaking down your door at 3 am, trashing your house and your beowulf cluster looking for your grow operation.