EFF: When Your Power Meter Becomes a Tool of Mass Surveillance

"...For a decade, the Sacramento Municipal Utilities District (SMUD) has been searching through all of its customers’ energy data, and passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police. .... This scheme has targeted Asian customers. SMUD analysts deemed one home suspicious because it was “4k [kWh], Asian,” and another suspicious because “multiple Asians have reported there.”"

eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/when…

#privacy #surveillance

When Your Power Meter Becomes a Tool of Mass Surveillance

Sacramento’s power company and law enforcement agencies have been running an illegal mass surveillance scheme for years, using our power meters as home-mounted spies.

^{Electronic Frontier Foundation}