Your Smart Electricity Meter Can Easily Spy On You

Modern meters can track not only when you’re not home, but what you’re up to when you're there.

Modern electricity usage meters provide innumerable benefits to utility companies, including a variety of remote access and monitoring tools to better manage the power grid. They also dramatically reduce the cost of technician visits for on-location meter readings.

But these devices also collect an ocean of private customer data, including detailed information that can be used to infer when you wake, when you sleep, and when you’re at home or away. In the past, electricity meters delivered a lump monthly figure to utilities, but smart meters transmit data in granular detail, often in increments ranging from fifteen minutes to every few hours.

This week, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Fourth Amendment does in fact protect energy-consumption data collected by smart meters. The ruling leans heavily on the Kyllo v. United States precedent that declared the use of thermal imaging tech to monitor citizens without a warrant also violates the Fourth Amendment.

The court was quick to point out smart meter data collection often provides much deeper insight than could be obtained via the thermal imaging tech that was at issue in the Kyllo ruling. In large part because modern appliances often have distinct energy-consumption patterns or “load signatures” that not only tell the utility when you’re home, but precisely what you’re doing.

“A refrigerator, for instance, draws power differently than a television, respirator, or indoor grow light,” the ruling notes. “By comparing longitudinal energy-consumption data against a growing library of appliance load signatures, researchers can predict the appliances that are present in a home and when those appliances are used.”

“The Seventh Circuit recognized that smart meters pose serious risks to the privacy of all of our homes, and that rotely applying analog-era case law to the digital age simply doesn’t work,” Jamie Williams, staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Motherboard. (Motherboard, August 24, 2018)
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While the court's ruling that the Fourth Amendment protects smart-meter data may limit access to that data by law enforcement, it doesn't prevent it from being accessed by business organizations, stolen by hackers, or used by some out of control government employee in a basement office keeping illegal files about you hidden away on a government computer network.