The Emerging Privacy Threat Posed by Smart Meters (and their enormous potential)

There is a critically important debate emerging throughout the country regarding the privacy consequences, implications and challenges that smart grid or smart metering technologies pose and how they can most effectively be addressed.

I delved into this subject quite deeply a few months ago in a post entitled The Privacy Challenges and Implications of a "Smart Grid". Since that time I have become more deeply involved in this issue in hopes of ensuring that the corporate interests seeking to maximize profit are not successful in portraying themselves as environmentally conscious stewards of the planet - and that protecting consumer privacy would somehow threaten this great mission.

The fact is that smart and effective environmental policy does not, and should not, conflict with the individuals right to privacy. Our society's transition to a smart grid system epitomizes this emerging and unnecessary "conflict" - and thus critical that we address it now - while this transition is still in the early stages of implementation.

It is because of this emerging false choice between the environment and privacy that we (Consumer Federation of California) are currently engaging the California Public Utilities Commission as they deliberate how to best implement a "smart grid" system.

Let me give some more backdrop in this issue by quoting some of what I wrote back in June of this year:

Transition to a "Smart Grid" system has been trumpeted by former Vice President Al Gore, and started gaining serious traction once President Obama announced his plan to overhaul U.S. infrastructure - including construction of a nationwide "smart grid" that promises to help address many of our current energy challenges.

According to Obama (and other environmental experts), the plan offers the hope that it "will save us money, protect our power sources from blackout or attack, and deliver clean, alternative forms of energy to every corner of our nation." What is especially interesting about this topic - to me anyway - stems from my past work as an environmental advocate versus my current work on privacy related issues. As some of you may have gathered, there are some issues in which these two interests - privacy and environment - clash (all be it more "gently" than other more typical oppositional interests).

Privacy is a concern when talking about a transition to a "smart grid" system because of the kinds of high resolution electricity usage information that it compiles and the intimate details of a consumer's daily life it monitors. This information in turn could then be used in ways potentially invasive to an individuals privacy.On the other hand, the environmental benefits of such a system, specifically the reduction in energy usage and greenhouse gas emissions (among others), represent a critical step forward and an important component to any comprehensive global warming and sustainability strategy.

And therein lies the challenge with a "Smart Grid": How do we balance the privacy concerns of the individual with the important environmental and energy security benefits of a more efficient energy infrastructure? Clearly, this is a challenge that must be worked out, and soon.While climate change threatens our species longterm survival, our right to privacy continues to be subverted by big business interests (esp. marketing and advertisers) and the government (esp. in the age of the phony 'war on terror').

The rapid advancement of technological innovation - without the requisite regulations to go along with them - only adds to this growing privacy protection challenge...which the development of a "Smart Grid" epitomizes.

Now let's get to the article that addresses this very topic in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

The meters could record material so frequently that power flows could be interpreted like DNA to reveal unique electrical signatures of individual appliances. Some experts imagine an Orwellian future in a carbon-constrained world, where consumers are cited for excessive electricity use, or divorce lawyers comb through meter records and ask: Who used the hot tub while the spouse was away?

...

Smart meters also will allow utilities to shut customers off remotely; currently, a crew has to physically disconnect the meter. They also will improve utilities' ability to detect and manage outages. But because they capture so much information, the meters also can reveal intimate details about activity inside a customer's house: when they are home; when they sleep; when they eat.

...

Analysts are only beginning to exploit the flood of data produced by the current generation of digital meters, which utilities such as Peco installed in the last decade to replace manual devices that had to be physically read every month by a meter reader.

Click here to read more.

I will be coming back to this topic a lot in the coming months, as I do feel it will be, and is already becoming, a critical issue for all those that care about privacy. Similarly, I believe it will serve as an opportunity for privacy and environmental advocates to demonstrate that we can work together in a way that protects both of our interests...and therefore those of the public as well.

There is no reason that privacy must be sacrificed at the alter of environmentalism - as protecting it will not reduce the potential of a smart grid system to reduce energy use. The real "enemy" is those that will seek to use these smart meters to gather, and then profit off our private information.

I can assure you that a key strategy that these corporate interests will utilize will be to pit those that advocate for privacy against those that work to address the environmental crisis we all face. We must not let this happen...and there is no better way to do this than by joining forces and working to ensure that our country's transition to a smart grid system is done in a way that protects the individuals right to privacy while helping reduce every households carbon footprint.

If you want to find out more about how this precisely can be done, I'd suggest you check out the recommendations made by Elias Leake Quinn CEES, Uni. Colo. Law School in his paper entitled "Privacy and the New Energy Infrastructure".

In one especially important passage he writes:

...the solution must involve, first and foremost, drawing attention to the potential privacy problem posed by the massive deployment of smart metering technologies and the collection of detailed information about the electricity consumption habits of millions of individuals. From there, efforts to devise potential solutions must progress in parallel paths, the first in search of a regulatory fix, the second a technological one. The first protects against the systematic misuse of collected information by utilities, despite new pressures on their profitability, by ensuring the databases are used only for their principle purposes: informing efficient electricity generation, distribution, and management. Such regulatory fixes are not difficult.

Indeed, Connecticut’s relevant regulations may already provide adequate protection against many of the “troubling implications” of this growing data set. Opt-in regulations are appropriate—at least in the short term—to protect consumers while the market for smart metering data develops and the full capabilities of those with access to that data are laid bare. As many states are taking a fresh look at their relevant regulations in connection with the restructuring of billing rates, swift action on this issue is both possible and easy.

The technological fix is a bit larger an obstacle, and solutions, on my part, more covered in lint. However, some recommendations are apparent even from this discussion. Specifically, the technological answer to these concerns must come in two parts: one addressing the security of the database as aggregated and kept by the utility, and the other addressing the security of transmitted data...One possible approach might be to aggregate and encrypt the data being sent from smart meters back to the utility by putting additional hardware on each transformer. This would basically anonymize an individual’s information to roughly the scale of a city block.

Click here to read the paper.