Too Far

This Ars story is a great example of how we can or cannot agree on where the line is for our expectation of privacy and what is tantamount to crossing it. This seems particularly germane at a time where people are spilling their guts to LLMs all day long in the personal and professional space. 

Per the story, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that the Sacramento Municipal Utility District's (SMUD) practice of flagging homes with high energy usage and reporting them to law enforcement constitutes a violation of privacy rights protected under federal and California law. EFF posits that this systematic analysis and sharing of energy use data represents a “mass surveillance scheme” and is comparable to conducting warrantless digital searches of households across an entire city. According to EFF, this undermines constitutional protections around the home and has led to police action against innocent residents whose high energy consumption has legitimate, non-criminal explanations, such as medical equipment usage or cryptocurrency mining.

While that argument is invalid, there is the the counter-argument which says that the utility’s actions can be defended as serving a legitimate public safety function rather than violating privacy. Utilities and law enforcement agencies have a responsibility to investigate potential criminal activities, such as illegal cannabis cultivation that often draws significant energy and can pose fire hazards and strain on public resources. 

The reporting of abnormal electricity patterns is based on observable, aggregate usage data not on fine-grained or intrusive surveillance of private activities. It could be reasoned that such aggregate consumption figures are akin to other neighborhood-level infrastructure monitoring, which is commonplace and often essential for community safety and regulatory compliance.