Eventually you have to trust the electric company will guard (or discard) your data - they need to get the data in some form anyway. While it might be nice to scrub the data before giving it to them, that may not be practical, as this service passes data both ways (the grid can signal appliances to not run when under heavy load, for example).<p>In terms of trust, this isn't any different from having to trust that your web service provider will protect your data. Granted, there is a substantial difference in choice - you likely only have one option for electrical service to a home, but a plethora of web hosting choices. Thus, this is fundamentally a regulatory issue (ie. call the Corporation Commission).<p>The alternative is to do it yourself (run your own server, make your own electricity with solar/wind/etc.), which, if you're really concerned about this, you might feel it's worth doing.
The author suggests we will have mechanisms that allow us to "own" data from smart meters. Never mind that the electric companies will think that they own the data.<p>The reality is ownership is a concept that really only works for scarce things like physical goods and services. Ultimately, you can't own information, you can only have it or not. To control information is to either make it scarce (like music and movies with copyright and DRM) or to control the actions of the party receiving it with licenses and contracts. Now who is going to win that battle? If you think consumers will, then you have to implement a mechanism to track actions taken on the basis of any information supplied by consumers. Pretty complicated, and consumers will have to feel threatened in order to pay for such things. Either that or ham-handed regulation gets imposed after some horrible information mishap.
Of course, someone could watch my house now and see when I turn on my lights. Better yet, they could see me stumble in when the bars close at 2 am. The issue isn't that private information is being made public, it's that the cost of gathering and aggregating public information is being drastically reduced.<p>Without smart meters, it might cost someone hundreds or thousands of dollars to hire a private detective to discover my drinking habits. My estranged spouse might be willing to spend that money in a custody case, but my life insurer wouldn't find it to be cost-effective. With new sources of low-cost data like that from smart meters, the calculation might be different.<p>(edit: corrected a couple of typos)