Smart grid privacy rules may be blown opportunity for science

Over the past several years, social scientists have had a field day studying the vast libraries of digital records that are produced as a happy byproduct of society's increased use of electronic systems.

Anonymized cell phone records have given us new perspectives on human mobility. Logs from virtual worlds like Everquest and World of Warcraft have powered studies in fields from behavioral psychology to epidemiology. Today's issue of Science contains a stark warning that researchers could miss out on what may eventually be an even greater opportunity for access to this sort of data: the smart grid. Combined, the US and Europe plan to install nearly 300 million smart grid devices within the next decade. Depending on the precise device used, these will monitor electricity use in homes and offices at time spans of considerably less than an hour and in some cases as short as every minute. The smartest of these devices can include data about specific appliances in use; by tracking things like current, phase, and frequency. Even the dumber ones can provide information about what's going on when it comes to power use. That sort of data presents both an incredible opportunity and an incredible risk. It can provide a great perspective on what's going on in different areas of a nation or the world, and associate it with all sorts of interesting variables: economic activity, pandemic spread, the weather, etc. The risk is that, if the data isn't suitably anonymized, the breach of privacy could extend to private activities conducted in the privacy of a person's home.