People are Talking: Social Media, Electric Companies, Customers and the Quest to Maintain Privacy

For the longest of time electric utilities had little reason to focus on customer communications, and their residential customers, similarly, often didn’t have much to say to them. So much so that when pressed, many customers couldn’t even name the company from which they purchased this essential service.

Well, as in many other aspects of modern life, things have changed:

• In some countries and states, de-regulation now means that customers have a choice of providers
• Utilities are learning that the more they communicate with customers about their new smart meters, before, during and after their installation, the better customers appreciate the functionality
• They also tend to give their utilities higher marks for the extra communications related to outages and restoration, as well as to new types of services

Of course, a great deal of the new communication is enabled by social media on laptops, tablets and smart phones.

And not unlike NASA’s rover Curiosity tweeting about its exploits on the red planet, once home area networks (HANs) are deployed in number, we’ll likely be seeing more and often stranger uses of social media, like:

• Appliances tweeting their status or the status of their contents. The world may soon know about, if not cry over, your spilt milk
• Your car complaining about its worn out tires on Facebook. Are you going to “like” that?
• Smart thermostats letting you play with your home lighting or adjust the AC remotely (actually, according to a Comcast commercial I just saw, you don’t have to wait for this).

If any of these scenarios raise your privacy or security hackles, you are not alone. But understand, others are working to ensure all parties to these matters play their part to keep users safe. A great group to visit for objective analysis and guidance on these and other related privacy issues is the Smart Grid Consumer Collaborative, or SGCC.

And of course, IBM is on the job here too. I’ve personally worked with clients trying to ensure they’ve got a handle on protecting all their customers’ sensitive info, including usage data as well as interactions occurring via customer web portals and social media. And the company has a number of products that make this complicated job a lot simpler and easier for utilities.

Lastly, you should know that one of the key foundational documents in our industry, developed by NIST with contributions from an SME cast of thousands (including yours truly and a number of Big Blue colleagues), has an entire volume dedicated to privacy in the Smart Grid context.