Ariel Bleicher writes:
Back in 2007, when the Dutch government announced that all 7 million homes in the Netherlands would be equipped with smart meters by 2013, it anticipated little resistance. After all, who wouldn’t welcome a device that could save both energy and money? But consumers worried that such intelligent monitoring devices, which transmit power-usage information to the utility as frequently as every 15 minutes, would make them vulnerable to thieves, annoying marketers, and police investigations. They spoke out so strongly against these ”espionage meters” that the government made them optional.
A report released this past April by the New York City–based consulting companyAccenture found that the Dutch are hardly alone. Of more than 9000 consumers polled in 17 countries, about one-third said they would be discouraged from using energy-management programs, such as smart metering, if it gave utilities greater access to data about their personal energy use. And in a comprehensive report on smart grid privacy released in September, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compiled a list of scenarios that consumers fear if their energy data got into the wrong hands.
Read more on IEEE Spectrum.
Via @PrivacyProf.