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The Gist: How Smart is Your Meter?
"By and large, people in Ireland like having heating, cooking facilities and hot water in their homes. And, ever since hanging large pots over open hearths burning dried cowpats fell from fashion, they have turned to electricity to meet those needs.
Now ESB gets activity in every home in Ireland, broken down into half-hour increments . The'll know whether the home is occupied and when we enter our homes, and the level of activity"
“These smart meters were originally set up to store detailed half-hour usage data but only transfer that stuff from the meter to ESB Networks if there was a request from the customer, or some other compelling reason why the data was required. Otherwise, the plan, as set out on the CRU's website, was for ESB Networks to default to getting a report once a day on how much power had been used in that 24 hours.”
“But ESB Networks is currently (from beginning of October 2022) rejiggling smart meters so that all the granular half hour data from its customers smart meters is being brought into a centralised database, whether customers consent or not and whether their billing tariff needs it or not (and this is suggested to increase to every fifteen minutes after 2025).
This is new.”
@Tupp_ed I believe DRI have filed a complaint with the DPC about this on behalf of an affected householder.
@DaraghOBrien @Tupp_ed the other bit of the DPIA tgatvstood out was that it only refers to account holders personal data, when they're collecting data on every person in the house
@Tupp_ed and despite all the smartness I am still told my bill is based on an estimated reading and would I mind submitting a reading.
@Tupp_ed So how do we GDPR-nuke this stupid idea?
@Tupp_ed Is that an AI-generated image of a meter?
@jernej__s Not really- I snapped my own meter and then jumbled the identifying bits.
@Tupp_ed There’s a reason I’ve turned away two attempts (at two different properties) to replace our meters with “smart” (surveillance) meters…
Neither of the engineers even argued when I told them my reason, they just nodded; they already know.
@Tupp_ed the machine learning experiment I’d be most excited to see done is to take ESB smart meter data and combine it with something like the smart card enntrance logs for an office. I’m reasonably certain that with 6-12mth of data it could identity, with some certainty, each employee’s home
@Tupp_ed no doubt this will be combined with other information and available to buy. I’m thinking of a particular company here.