It's greatly overstated. The smart meters exist to better coordinate power distribution. They won't know if you're using an electronic toothbrush or something that uses the same amount of current.

The current system requires that they guess at the demand and keep within a range. In the past that worked OK, because most devices weren't as susceptible to damage due to voltage fluctuation. So, they'd tend to keep the voltage closer to 126 than 120 knowing that it could get down to 114 without serious problems as devices are supposed to be able to handle it.

The power company needs to know when demand is likely to be higher or lower and to know roughly how much electricity they need to plan on providing at any given time. They can't target single houses, so keeping records of specific residences moment by moment makes no sense and they're certainly not going to be storing records of it forever, that would be a huge waste of money.

As far as spying goes, there's far more effective means of spying, the small amount of data that they could theoretically obtain like this would be of little use. The worst case scenario would be them identifying grow operations and they can already do that because pot growers use many times as much electricity as a normal residence would.

I'm hoping to begin an apprenticeship as a lineman next year, so I've already been reading up on the power grid. I'm personally one that tends to be more on the paranoid side of things, so chances are good that if I don't see a problem there probably isn't one.
Just make sure it's actual tin foil and not the cheap aluminum foil that they sell these days. The aluminum foil not only fails to block the mind reading equipment, it actually amplifies it.

Just like lots of other things that the government gets involved with, they'll shove it down everyone's throats and make it mandatory... until some engineer geek figures out a way to hack them and turn smart meters into RF bombs or EMP devices. Then the government will ban them. So be sure to do everything the government tells you! That is until they tell you to do something entirely different.

I pity the foo'! >:o

Assuming the data is sent for how much you use every minute, it can tell quite a bit. Every device will have it's own amount of pull, and quite a few devices will correlate to the same things (200wats might be your fridge, 100 watts for your water heater, and 15-50 watts for light bulbs). But very few devices are ever THAT precise, more likely bulbs deviate a bit, perhaps 50.0215 watts; And just doing several sets of divisions/subtractions and combinations what devices are noted and commonly used it can be determine if you turned on 2 lights and turned off 1, which can easily be translated as 'he changed to the back room'. If each bulb has it's own unique wattage number, they could over time figure out which lights correlate to what rooms.


Now let's consider at a programming/data level, if we took the amount of power used say 10 times a second, then shoved that into 10 floats, then sent a package every minute. That's a total of 4*10*60 + 16 (for house id and packet id) = 2416 bytes; that would be 3Mb a day and 1.2Gigs a year (raw data, compression and differential differences would likely greatly compress the data to a fraction of it's size, probably 200Mb). I know for 20 seconds at a time i might turn on a ice shaving machine, and honestly when things change 1-2 things at a time, it becomes easier and easier to identify based on how much power they use. Much like substitution based cryptography, all you need is more data before you can decode all the data in front of you. Bouncing 2k of data along a endless wireless router that only the energy company can use, and that's entirely possible.

So from the video and my personal perspective, it's entirely possible. But that's just how i see it.

I KNEW IT!
She's always watching me when I leave home! :O

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9mRl9tW3kE



This is something that COULD happen. But it's currently not, even with the newest meters. For the details to occur as the video posits, each device / appliance would need a digital identifier and some sort of networking hardware. Pretty sure my stove doesn't have that, nor my desk lamp, nor the garage door opener. So a smart meter will tell the power company that SOMEthing is occurring to cause 1.2 kW of consumption right now at this address, and they can make an educated guess based on the time of day, weather conditions, calendar date, etc., but they can't say with specificity what it is I'm doing with that power - at least not with today's smart meter.

I live in Australia I can confirm this they just came 4 years ago and installed it Makes your electricity bils WAY MORE EXPENSIVE and yes it's a spying tool they can monitor what you are doing in REAL TIME and it causes BAD PAINS IN YOUR BODY AS WELL BAD COLORECTAL PAINS!

At least try to say it with a straight face.

Okay I confess. The other day I recorded a baseball game without the express written consent of the Detroit Tigers or Major League Baseball.

To be fair, the real crime here is liking the Tigers after so many horrendous seasons.

What do I care, I'm a Cards fan. :P

According to the surveillance operator, they weren´t exactly "bats" nor "tigers" and the MLB badge actually resembled a bunny with a tie.

I'm suddenly reminded, back when i lived in a nearby town. The electrical billing was a little weird, because they had one entry for charging you per watt... Then they had a second entry that cost more that was a 'delivery charge'... Your electrical bill was almost always $200 or more.

That giraffe porn was legal where it was filmed!