A California judge has ruled to axe a longstanding law-enforcement program that monitored the near real-time smart meter use of thousands of residents of Sacramento, California, and shared some results with local police.
The program, which began in 2009, collected snapshots of residents’ electricity use every fifteen minutes and transferred them back to the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD), the city’s only electricity provider, multiple times a day.
Spikes in electricity use can indicate the presence of illegal activity, such as running unlicensed marijuana farms, which can be highly energy-intensive. But they can also simply indicate a lifestyle change, like buying an electric vehicle. Smart-meter fluctuations can also provide intimate details about a person’s life, such as when they get up and turn the lights on, leave the house, or go to bed.
The judge found that SMUD and the city “have developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement,” and that the electricity provider knew that the city’s ZIP-code-based requests “are not being made pursuant to an ongoing investigation.” They concluded that “SMUD knowingly discloses its customers’ electrical consumption data in violation of its obligations of confidentiality imposed by Public Utilities Code section 8381.”
SMUD’s Revenue Protection Unit would then look at data for signs of things like electricity theft or tampering, and share data with police if requested—for example, if they suspected illegal activity.
According to the filing, every three months Sacramento’s Cannabis Compliance and Investigations Unit submits a series of requests by ZIP code to the utilities provider, requesting a list of SMUD’s residential customers and addresses using at least 2,800 kWh per month.
The case was brought by three petitioners: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen, who were represented by the digital-rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Asian American advocacy group had argued that the dragnet “disproportionately harms Asian residents in Sacramento, and the targeting of the Asian community appears to be by design,” claiming that 85% of the fines issued were directed at people of Asian descent.
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In police lingo, a “dragnet” is an operation that has a coordinated approach aimed at a large number of targets—for example, searching every house on a particular street following a crime in the area.
“Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers’ electricity data to law enforcement without any “evidence to support a suspicion” that a particular crime occurred,” commented the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Relationships between smart-home data and law enforcement can often slide into controversy. In 2024, allegations emerged of footage from Amazon’s Ring home-security cameras being used maliciously against neighbors in response to police requests.
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