Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zdw | Hacker News Reader

Eventually you have to trust the electric company will guard (or discard) your data - they need to get the data in some form anyway. While it might be nice to scrub the data before giving it to them, that may not be practical, as this service passes data both ways (the grid can signal appliances to not run when under heavy load, for example).

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.

Ideally, you wouldn't have to trust them, you would be able to contract with them. Or rather, if you owned the data, they would have to contract with you to use it.

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.

It's looking likely that the EU will issue some sort of regulation on power-meter data, though I agree the likelihood of that happening in the US is fairly low. Here's an interim report by one of the EU's working groups: http://ec.europa.eu/energy/gas_electricity/smartgrids/doc/ex...

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.

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