Privacy and Smart Grid - More Than Meets the Eye: Via Smart Grid at Technology Marketing Corp.

One of the speakers I enjoyed hearing at the Smart Grid Summit was Catherine Thompson, who spoke on the Privacy and Security session. Catherine is the Regulatory and Policy Advisor at the Ontario Information and Privacy Commissioner’s Office. We all know there are many privacy issues associated with smart grid, but we don’t often get to hear from someone with such a strong focus in this area.
 
Aside from hearing her insights on privacy, Catherine has kindly offered to share a paper that her office recently produced specifically about smart grid issues. The paper is titled “SmartPrivacy for the Smart Grid: Embedding Privacy into the Design of Electricity Conservation,” and can be downloaded from our portal. Since most of you have not seen the paper yet, I’d like to summarize the key ideas here, and would encourage you to read it in full, and then see how these principles can be applied to your smart grid initiatives.
 
Catherine’s office has taken a strong thought leadership position in this area, and is based on the concept called Privacy by Design, developed by their Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ann Kavoukian, Ph.D. This thinking focuses on the idea that privacy considerations must be proactively built into technology advances. Privacy is too important to be an afterthought, and Privacy by Design recognizes that today’s technology has powerful implications for how information is created, managed and shared.
 
The paper begins with a fundamental assertion that the home is the most private of places, and any new technology crossing into that frontier needs to understand and reflect that. Historically, electricity has been a passive resource, simply flowing into the home. Smart grid technology enables intelligent, two way communication that can touch our lives in more profound ways.
 

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