Web thinkers are not confused by shiny new things « Jon Udell
blog.jonudell.net
blog.jonudell.net
In terms of trust, this isn't any different from having to trust that your web service provider will protect your data. Granted, there is a substantial difference in choice - you likely only have one option for electrical service to a home, but a plethora of web hosting choices. Thus, this is fundamentally a regulatory issue (ie. call the Corporation Commission).
The alternative is to do it yourself (run your own server, make your own electricity with solar/wind/etc.), which, if you're really concerned about this, you might feel it's worth doing.
I agree that given the current environment, it would require regulatory changes to implement the data ownership concept. And given the degree of regulatory capture in such markets, good luck getting such a change implemented.
The main things that seem likely are: 1) consumers will be guaranteed some sort of free access to their own usage data, partly in hopes that increased information about one's power usage will encourage people to use less; 2) there will be some sort of restriction on how personally identifiable, non-aggregate data can be used, e.g. the power company won't be allowed to infer things about your lifestyle based on power usage patterns, and then sell that data to advertisers.
Tricky areas are what counts as "aggregate" data (there are a lot of potential pitfalls there, both intentional exploitation of loopholes, and accidental leakage of identifiable data into aggregate data), and if there should be some sort of distinction between internal-to-operations and external data mining. For example, perhaps it would be okay for power companies to infer more specific things about individual lifestyles, if that information is only being used to optimize the power grid.
The reality is ownership is a concept that really only works for scarce things like physical goods and services. Ultimately, you can't own information, you can only have it or not. To control information is to either make it scarce (like music and movies with copyright and DRM) or to control the actions of the party receiving it with licenses and contracts. Now who is going to win that battle? If you think consumers will, then you have to implement a mechanism to track actions taken on the basis of any information supplied by consumers. Pretty complicated, and consumers will have to feel threatened in order to pay for such things. Either that or ham-handed regulation gets imposed after some horrible information mishap.
Without smart meters, it might cost someone hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire a private detective to discover my drinking habits. My estranged spouse might be willing to spend that money in a custody case, but my life insurer wouldn't find it to be cost-effective. With new sources of low-cost data like that from smart meters, the calculation might be different.
(edit: corrected a couple of typos)
Is this good or bad? Well, the same fundamental mechanisms that allow life insurers to spy upon you, allows you to find out if a multi-national is abusing your trust and say... funding an island dictatorship in exchange for water-rights.