John Richard

I had assumed that he didn’t want to use an app because of privacy concerns, not that he didn’t have a way to install the app. We’ve allowed this behavior to become normalized already though. It is significantly harder now days to find consumer products like routers that don’t require an app to manage & use. It’s not like either side of the political aisle has been seriously pushing for regulation regarding privacy, when they absolutely love being able to get all that data directly from these conglomerates without a court order.

Both actually… most smart meters are now smart enough to identify specific appliances, some have raised concerns & published papers showing that they may even be able to determine what TV channel an individual is watching. Power companies of course are also implementing machine learning to gather even more detailed information & behavioral patterns, including identifying patterns & usage of each household member:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonintrusive_load_monitoring

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9713145

You still are & just don’t know it. The power company can tell when & what devices you’re using. You’d need a way to store enough power so your appliances never connect directly to the grid, basically a power firewall.