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Comment by acomjean | Hacker News Reader

Yeah. I took my partners dog for the afternoon. It has an airtag (not an official supported use). I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy.

When I worked at a power monitoring startup (we monitored home power use, by individual circuit) this passive monitoring came up. And our CEO mentioned to his wife that she was home early.. "how did you know?" He saw the garage door circuit draw power... He was told he could keep his toys, but not to talk about them.

Our sales guy had a potential partners remote door installed. He noted one time the dog walker did a pretty short walk (the door opens where x minutes apart), and was wondering if he could mention it..

Passive monitoring is everywhere. Not just cell phones.

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Even back 20 years ago I was monitored by my ex-spouse by them simply watching the bank card transactions then calculating travel time. It was (or evolved in to) a full-blown anxiety disorder.

It’s easy to imagine that this higher level of easy surveillance is going to efficiently send others down the same path.

Supermarket loyalty card schemes give away medical insights into people & households, that they perhaps wouldnt want as public knowledge.

Search engines get given all sorts of data by people who give away medical data, financial data, crimes, both as victim and as perpetrator, past and present.

Social media interests give away data about people as well.

The internet is one giant intelligence tool and your every move, your every click gives away stuff.

In the 90's I had a Visual Basic addon AI which could work out who was typing at the keyboard. There was no need to have login screens and passwords, your typing pattern identified you.

Today smart phone's can tell if its you from the pressure of your finger, the surface area and shapes made by your finger as it moves around the screen. Again no need for login screens, but some people do know just how often women go through their partners smart phones! I'm surprised more women dont play poker!

This information wont be made known for a very long time if at all because not everyone on the planet is using the tech. If the true scale of surveillance was known, it would have to be broken to them gently as it could cause civil unrest.

Carte blanche access to peoples computers has been going on since the internet appeared.

>Today smart phone's can tell if its you from the pressure of your finger, the surface area and shapes made by your finger as it moves around the screen. Again no need for login screens, but some people do know just how often women go through their partners smart phones! I'm surprised more women dont play poker!

How exactly does one know of one's phone is being snooped on?

> How exactly does one know of one's phone is being snooped on?

You will definitely know when they tell you.

LOL - That sounds like speaking from experience!

Care to share the competitors in the power monitoring space? I could really use a solution to this because my home electric bill is crazy high. We moved in to a new house about eight months ago and this electric bill is like 30% higher than my previous home. Not just the raw total of the bill - my consumption is higher in this house.

I know of sense.com but perhaps there are others?

I've used The Energy Detective for a long time, but it is challenging to install the hardware in your breaker box.

For an easier approach, there are a bunch of wifi plugs that can report energy usage: https://www.androidcentral.com/which-smart-plugs-are-best-mo...

Our product was "site sage". Its subscription based and you have to install a current transformer around each circuit coming out of you electric box (you'd install in the circuit breaker box). But you did get circuit by circuit listings. Its also subscription based. The company has moved on to monitoring kitchen equipment, though they still sell them.

I've been out of the space for a while, but the "sense" power monitor was new when I left. It claims to use AI so you can just monitor the mains and it will suss out what is using power.

There were a lot of our home customers who were very obsessed with power use (trying to get to net 0 with solar). There have to be forums for this...

If you are looking for the manual way. getting a kill-o-watt and attaching it to your outlet is one way to see one of the things that takes a lot of power. I have the "Belkin" version which I like because the display isn't near the outlet. I'd suggest fridge... In my case my fridge was a large % of my power bill. Any electric heat.

https://www.belkin.com/au/support-article?articleNum=5381

Yeah, I’ve got one of those on my fridge, also.

When the monthly cost gets up to a certain level, we clean the coils and it drops back down.

I use Sonoff S31 smart plugs, flashed with Tasmota and connected to Home Assistant. It allows fine-grain monitoring of anything that plugs in to the wall, even if you disable the remote on/on switch (like for the fridge/deep freeze). LED bulbs use basically nothing and so can be removed from the equation, then all that’s left is built-in temp/humidity/air units and car chargers (though most of those have great metrics built in)

If it's an older refrigerator or a dusty house, check the refrigerator coils. In particular if it's set to a pretty cool setting but doesn't seem very cool or is running frequently it may be time for replacement.

You can also get any of a variety of temperature sensors (I like SensorPush) and stick one in the fridge to get a pretty good idea of how much it's running the compressor.

Another thing to look at if there's central forced-air heating/cooling may be whether it's set to have the fan always running. That can be useful in balancing temperatures between floors, but it's still a fan using electricity to move air.

Sense just guesses everything wrong. I can strongly recommend Emporia energy, which has per circuit monitors.

That's a good tip, I've been really disappointed in our Sense's ability to detect anything correctly. It's detected 9 heating devices so far. I suspect that our variable speed heat pump is hard for it to figure out reliably.

I ordered the additional sensor that I'll use for the heat pump and one more circuit and see if it does any better, if not, the Emporia seems reasonably priced for as many sensors as it has.

I purchased an Emporia unit and installed last night. Pretty rad so far. Only wish a single unit supported more clamps. My panel has 30+ circuits so it's tempting to install a second Emporia unit :)

If you're interested in local control and open source:

https://circuitsetup.us/

A few other folks and I have recently reverse-engineered and built open source firmware for the Emporia Vue 2. Supports 16 + 3 clamps each, works together great with Home Assistant.

- amazon page (even if you buy from their website, they just order it to you off amazon): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CJGPHL9/

- install instructions: https://gist.github.com/flaviut/93a1212c7b165c7674693a45ad52...

- source code: https://github.com/flaviut/esphome/tree/emporia-vue

One great use case of passive monitoring is detecting water leaks, especially for vacation homes.

> It has an airtag (not an official supported use)

I'm surprised. That sounds like a great use for it, especially for a larger breed that runs fast.

That is one use for monitoring, with the related use of doing so to your own home, that I think is really worth doing. Especially, if you live in the northland where freezing is a problem.

I often wonder about these services and if we can wrap them in enough privacy to make them feel safe to advanced users?

The only way I see this ending is splitting airtags into two populations: remote-tracking enabled and remote-tracking disabled where they act like a regular bluetooth tag. Enabling the remote-tracking feature will probably require you to register with Apple with photo ID and have your identity visible to anyone within range of the airtag.

Which is fine by me. I'm just excited to have a way to get my cat back if she ever escapes outside.

> especially for a larger breed that runs fast.

Young Husky. Medium breed that can run far and sometimes doesn't listen (like a cat... but bigger)

They have pet trackers.. But I'm not sure if its because its transmitting a lot and its close to them on their collar.. In this case in on her going outside harness..

Yeah. I took my partners dog for the afternoon. It has an airtag (not an official supported use). I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy.

We have a tracking collar for our dog. The actual tracker is around 1" x 2", and gives realtime reports via the cell network. it would be easy to use it to track a spouse or car or whatever.

Yeah, the problem with AirTags is that they need iPhones nearby to identify and track them. So, dog tags is not really a good use case. For dog tags, you want something with a GPS and cellular connectivity.

Now, for tracking your cats around the house, I think that’s a better use of AirTags.

Someone told me that by examining smart meter data by amount, time and duration different appliances could be identified. He was rather surprised himself by the level of detail.

You may be shocked how much more you can get, I heard of being able to identify the movie/tv show you are watching based on power consumption of the TV based on brightness.

Obviously depends on how granular the smart metering is, but it sent chills down my spine.

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/01/08/28c3-smart-meter...

You may be shocked what you can figure out from... analyzing the sound of a video. https://youtu.be/e0elNU0iOMY

"Sense" does this, although some people have problems with the training. https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B08N5GWZWQ

Imagine a police force wanting to catch a hacker with his computer unlocked. They could wait for him to make tea to strike.

Or perhaps they could correlate a person's anonymous internet activity with their use of electricity.

Does anyone know of any communities who are designing to avoid passive monitoring or at least have a "dark mode" that's possible to enable?

I think such things should be enshrined in law, however we've not reached that state with the law yet in most places - I don't think?

> I knew the dog had it but there was some comment made about our walk. Monitoring by proxy.

What does this even mean?? Your partner commented on it??

Basically I got a comment that she already knew where we went on our walk because she checked the dogs location.

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