"I'm not going to lie. It felt weird polling the meter readings for the entire neighborhood."

Yikes, and I though we had it bad here in the Netherlands where you explicitly needed to opt-out of your power supplier being able to read your meter.

At least here it is ordered that if these newer 'smart meters' are to be installed they always need to include a 'P1 port' which allows the home owner to simply read out the metrics every 10 seconds using a serial device.