[acomjean]

these smart homes bring up ethical dilemas. I worked for a company and someone got a home automation kit. It monitored comings and goings. They looked at the logs and realized the dog walker one day did a really short walk. How do you broach this? Do you bother for an otherwise responsible walker.

I worked for a power monitoring company that put a box in your house, monitored power use for each circuit breaker. The CEO noticed that his house cleaners turned on lights in all the rooms and turned them off as they finished cleaning them.

You can learn a lot from watching a homes power, especialy if its split up circuit by circuit.

[autokad]

When obama said we need a more 21st century efficient power grid, i thought that sounds great. i thought that meant better equipment and lines that doesnt waste as much electricity, nope. it meant 'smart meters' that can tell all sorts of things about us. they didnt want to save electricity, they wanted our data.

The city wanted to install one of those smart meters in my home, i refused. but I was told that unless i have them installed, they would shut off my electricity. Being that they were in a position of power over me, I complied.

[Gibbon1]

Thought, putting a backup battery in your garage could be used to deny utilities any data other than your daily power maybe weekly power usage.

[pavel_lishin]

Question: what does the smart meter tell them that monitoring your usage otherwise wouldn't?

[kageneko]

I seem to recall a paper about using the noise in the electrical system of a home to determine what appliances were plugged in and turned on at any point in time.

Sidhant Gupta, Matthew S. Reynolds, and Shwetak N. Patel. 2010. ElectriSense: single-point sensing using EMI for electrical event detection and classification in the home. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM international conference on Ubiquitous computing (UbiComp '10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 139-148. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1864349.1864375

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1864375

That said: I used to work for a smart meter manufacturer and (AFAIK) we didn't do anything like that. Granular readings were the most important part. Our meters could report in 15 minute buckets, which was useful for tiered billing. Most of the push back against these meters were because they use radios to report readings back and there was concern about radiation. There were people who were building faraday cages around the meters.

[whatshisface]

Dumb meters integrate (sum) power over the entire time between manual readings. Smart readers can report far more granular data.

[crtasm]

Potentially, what's playing on your TV

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/08/28c3-smart-meter...

[pavel_lishin]

> The CEO noticed that his house cleaners turned on lights in all the rooms and turned them off as they finished cleaning them.

That's pretty clever, actually.

[carapace]

> How do you broach this? Do you bother for an otherwise responsible walker.

I believe that it is fundamentally not possible to roll back the degree of surveillance in our global society in an effective way. Our technology is already converging to a near-total degree of surveillance all on its own. The end limit will be Vinge's "locator dust" or perhaps something even more ubiquitous and ephemeral.

I believe the true horror of technological omniscience is that it'll force us for once to live according to our own rules. For the first time in history we'll have to do without hypocrisy and privilege. We're going to learn what explicit rules we can actually live by, finding, in effect, the real shape of human society.

[gowld]

Employees/vendors/contractors are usually under surveillance for their work activities. That's accountability.

[whatshisface]

That's not accountability to the people at risk. Trust me, you do not want to have to go to the courts for damages, especially if they were completely nonmonetary...