IT’S THIS THING CALLED THE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Just because a company sells you a product or owns the transmit of said product does not give them the right to invade the privacy if an American Citizen with out due process or probable cause. Hello? We still have protection of our rights here Americans. Start demanding your precious rights as afforded to you under the document YOUR government agreed to govern by…the Constitution ant the Bill of Rights.

Bless you Redi-Kilowatt you are a naive soul. Brochures by nature are a dummied down sales tools for low informed consumers to present a company’s product or service in the best light in order to promote that product’s sales. PURE MARKETING and not a reliable source of information for deep technical matters such as these. Dig a little deeper please electric man. Do you not see where this will end up? YOUR electric company is fixing to charge you the consumer surcharges for premium use time slots in keeping with the global warming …he who controls the resources (ultimately the Feds) wins agenda. Excuse me but if Siemens Executive says they have minute by minute time stamps i believe him and you can bet his competition does aid well! You can also place a bet that our corrupt law officials will circumvent the constitution by using the technology sans warrant to gather pre-probable cause data as the other blogger pointed out. THINK YOU HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE DEAR FELLOW CITIZENS? That is not how totalitarianism works. We all become criminals for imagined or newly outlawed offenses. Will you be targeted, fined, jailed as an environmental terrorist because you over use electicity? Why give an increasingly abusive central athority the rope to gang us with? And yes your little local power company is tied to the central authority via DOE oversight and the bribes/grants they receive from said agency/so.

What, if any, restrictions are there on collecting readings, on using them for ones own purposes, or reselling them?
Could law enforcement do such collection without a warrant?
Could companies or private individuals harvest this information out of the air and sell it (bypassing restrictions on what the utility can do with the information)?

“It is critically important that law enforcement not be able to obtain Vermonters’ smart meter data without a warrant,” Gilbert said, adding that customers whose usage data are being subpoenaed should be notified and given an opportunity to try to block the subpoena.”

The Associated Press November 15, 2011 – Smart meters raise privacy, health concerns in Vt.
http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financialnews/D9R18H083.htm

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cS7QYACmug

These are small devices with a small LCD display that can show you your total home power usage or dollar amount spent for real time power usage.

They talk about how they can open their fridge door and look over and see the power usage go up. That’s real time usage information.

The “HAN” network is built into “Smart” Meters. It broadcasts this real time information UNENCRYPTED via radio, and from OUTSIDE your home.

Meaning it can be picked up easier from OUTSIDE than inside your house. The signal is stronger outside than it is inside!

Anyone with a high gain antenna will be able to monitor your power usage and tell whether you are home or not, or get your daily patterns. Burglars?

You don’t have to own a “in home monitoring device” for the HAN to broadcast your private power usage data to the neighborhood. It’s built in and ready to go! It could be broadcasting that data right now!

The “HAN” also gives hackers another access point to try to hack your meter and possibly change it’s programing from a remote location. You will never know.

Your “Smart” Meter is the next big ego challenge to hackers. Don’t be part of the problem!

Call and refuse installation today! Use the example letters at the link on this site above to set up your written complaint so they will be on notice of all the bad things about these meters.

Jim,
I take the time to post what PG&E wrote in their brochure ‘word for word’ to help inform the readers on this site what is going on with PG&E’s SmartMeter program. I do not post this information to make you mad.
If you think what PG&E writes is false information, then instead of personally attacking me, I suggest that you take up your beef with them (PG&E).
Keep in mind that there are many energy monitoring and management systems and corporations that have been performing these services for decades. Look up Leviton, they are one of the many big ones. Usually, it is only large commercial and industrial operations that utilize these services. Marketing these services to residential customers is a brand new corporate venture that may or may not pan out.
That’s the way it goes when corporations risk investing in new ventures.
No doubt that the ZigBee/HomePlug alliance will offer these new residential services to customers as soon as they finish developing the HAN’s, but these monitoring services are expensive. Most customers probably will not use outside monitoring services, and probably can’t even afford the in home HAN monitoring systems.

Read what I said.

The data came from somewhere for “yesterday”, when did that happen? Today?

Radio Frequency transmission, you have no idea how many times a day the data is sent OVER THE AIR because only the people who program the meters know that, probably NOT the executives upstairs. And that can change any time they want.

And just to repeat myself, you have no idea the resolution of the ACTUAL RF TRANSMITTED DATA THAT COMES FROM THE METERS, who cares what is shown on the web page, the power company could have minute by minute data coming in and only show you hourly, DID YOU READ MY POST AT ALL?

You are starting to do this cause a disservice, please learn something about computer technology and small device programming before you spread incorrect information.

I like you and I understand after many posts that you are some kind of electrical installer. OK fine, I get that. But that doesn’t mean you know what goes on inside a programmed device or how data processing systems work.

Someone changing their daily habits could be a sign of them being gone on vacation. Using the meter data (via RF antenna) from many days, and I don’t have to be close by to get the data from the mesh, I can build daily habits and figure out when you have changed that. Things that most people don’t “simulate” with timers include the water heater (showers), TVs, computers and the microwave, electric stove or toaster oven, toaster, coffee pot, etc…

From this data I could tell easily if you are home or not. This may be better than watching for your cars leaving and easier because you could profile 100’s maybe 1000’s of homes all at once with a computer program and some statistics software.