[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...