Some people may be irrational, but smart meters are a huge privacy concern - the electricity company can figure out your patterns from the power usage and the "shape" of it. This is the reason why I don't want a smart meter.
Disclaimer: I actually was involved in building firmware and management software of smart meters.
I can tell from your old spinning mechanical meter that you're at home and not on vacation. That's personal information. Why is a smart meter so different?
A spinning meter can be manually checked to find out if someone is on vacation, but doing that is slow and isn't very worthwhile for criminals. Being able to monitor 100,000 meters at once for empty homes might suddenly be very economical for criminals.
- When you’ve gone on vacation and your home is unattended.
- When you have an additional tenant, a long-term houseguest, have a new significant other or even have a baby.
- Whether or not you’re actually working when you’re working from home.
- Homes that use greater than X amount of electricity are at greater risk of Y and so your home owners/rental/car insurance premium goes up.
- People who play computer/video games late at night are at higher risk for health issues is your health insurance premium goes up.
And I bet there are other, much more subtle things they could figure out once given the opportunity to vacuum up your data: like estimate what temperature you set your AC to and determine whether or not someone in the house was awake at any given moment of any given day.
This seems to be an annoying issue. Any serious proponent of privacy is already taking steps to hold on its vestiges, which include not taking a public stance on it.