MSU Prof: Utilities Can Sell Your Information

Michigan State University Professor Adam Candeub, in an interview with WLIX--Channel 10, says that Michigan utilities have no legal restrictions on what they can do with information they gather about your electrical usage. "It can sell this information. It can use this information like Google does to provide advertisers for markets. This can be viewed as an invasion of people's privacy." There is currently a voluntary code of conduct amongst utilities. "Very sensitive information can be revealed about homes, and homes are the most sacred privacy environment," said Nancy King, an Oregon State University business law and ethics academic who’s studying smart meter deployments (quoted in a 2015 Politico story on smart-meter data-mining). These include inferences about the number of people in a home and when they are there, daily routines, degree of religious observance and what religion the person follows, what televisions shows are being watched when, what time the inhabitants go to bed, and much more. 

Utilities are unlikely to share individual data. What they are interested in is aggregated data--what is going on a specific street, a neighborhood, a zip code. That data, says Politico, could be a "gold mine" for "retailers deciding where to open their next store, marketers profiling neighborhoods with an even finer tooth comb, or in ways we have yet to even think up. etailers deciding where to open their next store, marketers profiling neighborhoods with an even finer tooth comb, or in ways we have yet to even think up."

"When you become a company whose most valuable asset is not the kilowatt-hours but the data, that fundamentally changes what kind of company you are,” says a director at the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners quoted in Politico.

Consumers Energy claims that it does not share your information with outside parties. That may be true now, but we know that part of the reason the utilities are in favor of smart meters is to make money off the data they can sell to third parties.

Some utility executives maintain that they legally cannot share even anonymized data. In response to that, Oregon professor King says in the Politico article: “It would be fair to probably assume that many, many consumers would give unfettered access to their data through a smart meter to providers who would give them free energy.”

Most utility execs seem to take the point of view that the data can and should be sold. Says a Centerpoint Energy executive, “We do 221,000,000 meter reads a day …We can do nothing with that data, or we can mine that data and use what we find from mining that data …That is very exciting to me today.”See SmartGridAwareness.