Will the Smart Grid Watch You?

"Big Brother is Watching You" is the famous line from Eric Arthur Blair's "1984." (Blair is better known by his pen name, George Orwell, a moniker he enjoyed hiding behind.) I'm sure, when Blair wrote that book, he never realized it would take on such a life of its own.

When I attended ICUEE in Louisville last week, one of the guys in the booth next to me started to quiz me about the smart grid, how he had heard it would let the electric companies control all his power. He was afraid of that, and he tossed out the Orwell line when we discussed the smart grid.

This Big Brother phenomenon started popping up recently in blogs and discussion groups---whether the smart grid will allow people to know your business and pass it along to government authorities. Bob Sullivan, an MSNBC blogger with a spot called "The Red Tape Chronicles" wrote: "Utility companies, by gathering hundreds of billions of data points about us, could reconstruct much of our daily lives."

My honest reaction to all of this Big Brother fear mongering: So what?

Really, what's new about companies knowing everything about us? In this digital society, our business is everybody's business.

Your GPS in your car knows where you've been and where you're going. That information is recorded, and, sometimes, sent back to a "home base" customer service bank in case you call in and they need to locate you or related information.

Your cable TV system/DVR knows what you watch. The cookies on your computer know what you surf on the Internet and transmit that info to companies like Google every time you open that Web browser.

Your debit card records every single item you buy. Your cell phone notes every single number you dial (and where you are). You trust companies to pull regular payments straight from your bank account electronically.

And, if you shop online, you get that information reprocessed for marketing constantly. For example, I added a new high-end face wash product to my Amazon wish list a month ago and am now inundated with e-mails about how I can get that product free if I buy a certain amount of another product.

Face it, we are not put upon by the all powerful; we are not forced to hand over information. In fact, we offer it up. We contribute to "the man" knowing things about our daily lives whenever we are awake, basically. By choice, even. Most of the time, we ignore the potential dangers of this because these are technologies we trust with perks we enjoy (like GPS pinpointing on your cell if your car breaks down or, perhaps, something as innocuous as a coupon direct-marketed to us on our grocery receipt for something we regularly buy).

The smart grid will have significantly less power in your daily life than your debit card or your cell phone as far as personal information is concerned, yet we fear it. Perhaps it is because we've grown used to the debit card and the cell phone and the GPS. I imagine these items all created the same scary thoughts when they surfaced, but we've discovered that our fears were unfounded.

The same will be true with an intelligent electric network. So, to chase away the dark dreams that might be haunting you this Halloween, remember: Your utility will only care about the data that impacts their business, as is the way with any company. No one there will give a rat's patootie if you've got more Christmas lights than your neighbor or if you turn on all your appliances at the same time to create a musical, mechanical choir---just for the fun of it. They only care about the big numbers and the bottom line and how your data feeds into that. Period.

I promise you: We are not Winston Smith, and your power company is not Big Brother. There is no smart grid boogie man.