One of the speakers I enjoyed hearing at the Smart Grid Summit was Catherine Thompson, who spoke on the Privacy and Security session. Catherine is the Regulatory and Policy Advisor at the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s Office. We all know there are many privacy issues associated with smart grid, but we don’t often get to hear from someone with such a strong focus in this area.

 

Aside from hearing her insights on privacy, Catherine has kindly offered to share a paper that her office recently produced specifically about smart grid issues. The paper is titled “SmartPrivacy for the Smart Grid: Embedding Privacy into the Design of Electricity Conservation,” and can be downloaded from our portal. Since most of you have not seen the paper yet, I’d like to summarize the key ideas here, and would encourage you to read it in full, and then see how these principles can be applied to your smart grid initiatives.

 

Catherine’s office has taken a strong thought leadership position in this area, and is based on the concept called Privacy by Design, developed by their Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Kavoukian, Ph.D. This thinking focuses on the idea that privacy considerations must be proactively built into technology advances. Privacy is too important to be an afterthought, and Privacy by Design recognizes that today’s technology has powerful implications for how information is created, managed and shared.

 

The paper begins with a fundamental assertion that the home is the most private of places, and any new technology crossing into that frontier needs to understand and reflect that. Historically, electricity has been a passive resource, simply flowing into the home. Smart grid technology enables intelligent, two way communication that can touch our lives in more profound ways.

 

The paper makes a valid point that other services that enter the home generally respect our privacy – such as the postman or the cable provider – and electricity shouldn’t be any different. These parties could pry on our personal lives – and they no doubt do on occasion – but there is a tacit understanding that they should not.

 

As such, smart grid creates a Pandora’s (News - Alert) box of sorts, where utilities have these new-found capabilities, and the paper rightly argues that privacy issues need to be addressed now, before smart grid – and by extension smart home – deployments get too far along. The paper does a nice job defining the Smart Grid vision and outlining the various benefits we can expect to see in our homes. If taken at face value, it’s all good. Within Ontario, the paper explains how smart grid is aligned with two drivers for energy conservation; reducing peak period consumption and supporting alternative energy sources. Surely, these noble goals justify the investment and stimulus funding that is making smart grid possible today.

 

While utilities welcome modernization of their infrastructure, unintended consequences are inevitable. We all understand that smart grid enables valuable communication and information sharing with the home, but where things become murky is the nature of this information. Utilities were never concerned with how energy was used inside the home, but now they will be privy to overwhelming volumes of data. Not only will they have continuous data streams, but much more granular information that reveals far more than basic consumption patterns.

 

In this regard, smart grid opens up a whole new world of information possibilities, and the paper cautions us about things like “electricity usage profiles” that reveal a great deal about our behaviors, patterns and preferences. The simple act of turning on the dryer or setting the home alarm can be taken as indicators of what goes on inside the home, and over time, the reams of data collected by the utility can paint a very telling picture for those looking for certain things.

 

This hints at the Big Brother scenario I’ve long been wary of with smart grid. For the most part, utilities can only glean limited intelligence from such data, but a more cynical view points to what could happen if this data was shared, leaked or sold to other parties with very different objectives. As the paper notes, this type of data could be of great value to a wide variety of parties. On a purely commercial level, consider the possibilities with Google (News - Alert) Power Meter, for example, and the scenarios for creating targeted advertising programs based on profile data captured from energy usage. Other examples would be insurance companies, employers and government agencies, all of whom could gather valuable intelligence from this type of data.

 

All of this leads up to what I consider the strongest message of the paper. For smart grid – and more specifically, Smart home – to truly be a win-win for utilities and consumers, deployments must gain our trust. These initiatives need to be developed and delivered in a transparent manner that respects privacy and shows an implicit understanding that this type of information will always be managed in a responsible way. If not, consumers will not adopt these new technologies, and some will even find ways to subvert it – and in either case, smart grid’s failure will be assured.

 

While this may seem like basic common sense, utilities have not been thrust into this role before, which is why the paper was written. Utilities have never had a personal relationship with consumers, but they will with smart grid, and along with that come important responsibilities.

 

Privacy simply cannot be ignored, and utilities cannot afford to underestimate its importance. To be fair, though, the paper places equal emphasis on the consumer side of the equation. I’m glad to see attention drawn to the role consumers can play in their own demise if they do not carefully guard personal information. The reference to Facebook (News - Alert) is very apropos and one doesn’t have to look far to find examples of people sharing far too much personal data on the open Internet. As such, the paper stresses the importance of public education as part of a broader strategy for ensuring best practices for smart grid privacy.

 

This brings us to the paper’s wrap-up, which presents a variety of smart grid applications with explicit privacy issues related to each. I found this breakdown very helpful, as it makes you realize that various components of smart grid have distinct privacy implications. By extension, a comprehensive privacy strategy requires careful planning that can really only be done on the front end of a smart grid deployment. Fortunately, it’s still early days with smart grid, but it’s clear to me that if this type of thinking isn’t in the mix at the beginning, it will more likely hold back success than any technological shortcoming ever could.