Australian Smart Meter Data Shared Far and Wide

New submitter ferrisoxide.com writes "In Victoria (Australia), detailed information about electricity customers' power usage, which gives insights into when a house is occupied, is being shared with third parties including mail houses, debt collectors, data processing analysts and government agencies."

Comments

Opted out of PG&E online bills

[Animats]

I had to opt out of Pacific Gas and Electric's online billing system and go back to paper bills when they changed their EULA to allow more "disclosure". If I just buy power from them, they're subject to regulatory rules, enforced by the California Public Utilities Commission. But they wanted me to sign up for an "online account", which isn't regulated. If you don't sign up, they're not allowed to redistribute your "smart meter" info. If you sign up, you've consented to distribution to "affiliates".

I strongly recommend opting out to PG&E customers (California, Nevada) who are concerned about privacy issues.

Re:Shocked

[Tastecicles]

(take it from someone who [still] owns a Cybernet Delta 1): the 934 rigs are notorious bleed boxes. Even with a 1.1 SWR (as close to perfect antenna balance as you'll ever get) you can bleed out over 600kHz each way with a 50W amp. The issue was that the equipment was overpowered and undercooled for what was being asked of it (30 miles on an average day?), the bleed induced by the linear amplifiers cooking themselves very quickly. With anything less than perfect SWR you'll bleed out even further into neighbouring bands.

FWIW, GSM900 was never widely adopted in the UK, distributors instead preferring GSM1800. The 934 crowd never got their bandwidth back to this day.

Thing is, GSM never even touched 934. GSM900 uses 890–915 MHz to send information from the mobile station to the base station (uplink) and 935–960 MHz for the other direction (downlink), providing 124 RF channels (channel numbers 1 to 124) spaced at 200 kHz. Duplex spacing of 45 MHz is used. Guard bands 100 kHz wide are placed at either end of the range of frequencies.