re: Embracing Disruption and Standards for the Sake of a Smart Grid

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:14:30 GMT

Tim, you raise an interesting and important point. Technology is an enabler and an amplifier, neutral in itself but able to make our personal and social interactions better or worse. The Smart Grid will be a business and social network as well as communications and control network. It’s not hard to envision "big brother" scenarios enabled by a Smart Grid architecture that does not have security and privacy protections built in. The good news is that many stakeholders, including Microsoft, are fully aware of those dangers and are working to avoid them. No one should be able to access your private energy usage information (or control it remotely) without your permission. Other players in the network can offer you incentives to knowingly release your private data, perhaps aggregated and/or anonymized, so that they can provide enhanced services based on your personal activities and usage, but should be a voluntary thing, based on full disclosure. The disclosure must include clear boundaries and limits as to how personal data is passed through the network. On the flip side, a truly decentralized peer-to-peer Smart Grid can even enhance personal autonomy and freedom. For example, an extended family or a small community could arrange for a group relationship with the Grid, buying and selling energy with the outside world as a unit while thus maintaining even more privacy about internal usage than is possible today. Or to take a very simple single-family example: Today, if I own two homes, the power company could readily tell which one my family is living in at the moment. With an open platform Smart Grid, that personal detail – why is it anyone else’s business whether I’m living in my normal residence or my vacation home? – could be hidden behind a single account identity that buys and sells energy on my behalf, regardless of my current physical location. In other words, electron flows can be separated from cost responsibility, thus increasing personal autonomy and privacy, and creating the possibility of greater and greater decentralization of power (no pun intended). As a technology platform, the Smart Grid must be open, flexible, neutral, and secure. Microsoft is committed to working with our partners, policymakers, and other stakeholders to ensure that privacy values are honored and even enhanced in the new era of smart and sustainable energy.

re: Embracing Disruption and Standards for the Sake of a Smart Grid

Anonymous — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 17:13:54 GMT

The Smart Grid sounds like a key component, combined with GPS technology, to allow a government to know (and theoretically control) much of what its citizens do. A system observer could tell, for starters, when and where you drive, when you arrive home, when you go to bed, when you arise and leave, even when you have guests (a measurable rise in power and utility usage). One never has to look far to see the dark side of any ostensibly useful technology, and that dark side here is extensive indeed.