Residential utility customers have a legitimate expectation to preserve individual and behavioral privacy with regard to energy-related or water consumption data collected by the utility. Credible government reports and security experts have explained that there are privacy concerns that the granular data collected by smart meters will reveal the activities of people inside of a home by measuring their usage frequently over time. Furthermore, there is deep concern that inadequate cyber security measures surrounding the digital transmission of smart meter data will expose such data to misuse by authorized and unauthorized users of the data. Residential utility customers have currently only surrendered a privacy interest to the extent necessary to account for monthly billing by the utility, unless otherwise explicitly granted. Normally, only one energy or water usage measurement per month is necessary for the billing process.
That, and be able to adjust billing to surges.
The secondary concern is reading the real-time usage by a nefarious actor, which has proven to be useful to ML applications for intuiting what types of activities are happening on the circuit. Obviously this pales in comparison to the potential abuse allowed by smart NICs and modems, but as a secondary measure or where a user is obscuring their network activity with encryption or similar, a real-time power reading would be helpful too.
It’s just another vector that enables possible abuse, and one that you don’t have any choice over. My utility installed one of these on my house this year and we were not given any choice.
It’s important to remember that POCOs are highly regulated, and they’re not allowed to frivolously charge whatever they feel like, even in high demand conditions (probably state-dependent, but that’s at least the case here in CA).
And I see where you’re coming from. At this point in the world, where just about every data point about a person/household is tabulated and used in ways to coerce you to spend more money, I just feel like this is low on the priority scale. The utilities’ motivation for smart meters is mostly labor cost reduction (meter readers). The remainder is real time grid load monitoring and statistics that better enables them to manage surge generation to keep costs down. This comes from a family friend that’s a higher up in SoCal Edison. They legit don’t care if someone is using an industrial grade sex machine or growing weed (though the municipality might). The biggest issue I can see with this, like anything else and as you alluded to, is data security/privacy.