Your Outlet Knows: How Smart Meters Can Reveal Behavior at Home, What We Watch on TV

Jordan Robertson
Bloomberg.com
6/10/2014

Smart meters may be getting too smart for our own good.

As businesses look for new ways to gain insight into consumers, utility meters that wirelessly transmit energy-usage data are increasingly drawing attention because of what they can reveal about our behavior at home, such as when and how often we use certain appliances.

Last month, a unit of WPP, the world’s biggest advertising agency, announced it was teaming up with London-based software company Onzo to study ways to collect smart-meter data on household energy use. Onzo CEO Joel Hagan told Bloomberg News that the information has the potential to “open the door of the home.”

But unlocking the front door is just the beginning. The next stop for big data could be on the sofa next to us as we watch TV. Information flowing through smart meters can be mined to determine users’ viewing habits — not just that people are watching TV, but which programs they’re watching, down to individual scenes at specific times, according to a little-known study by the University of Applied Sciences in Steinfurt, Germany…

 

 

The article continues at Bloomberg.com

 

 

A senior energy technician for Commonwealth Edison holds a standard electricity meter, left, and a new "smart" meter in North Riverside, Ill. on Sept. 6, 2013.  Photographer: M. Spencer Green/AP Photo

A senior energy technician for Commonwealth Edison holds a standard electricity meter, left, and a new “smart” meter in North Riverside, Ill. on Sept. 6, 2013. Photographer: M. Spencer Green/AP Photo

 

 

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