Holistic Privacy for Electricity, Water, and Natural Gas Metering in Next Generation Smart Homes

Abstract

In smart electricity grids, high time granularity (HTG) power consumption data can be decomposed into individual appliance load signatures via nonintrusive appliance load monitoring techniques to expose appliance usage profiles. Various methods ranging from load shaping to noise addition and data aggregation have been proposed to mitigate this problem. However, with the growing scarcity of natural resources, utilities other than electricity (e.g., water and natural gas) have also begun to be subject to HTG metering, which creates privacy issues similar to that of electricity. Therefore, employing privacy protection countermeasures for only electricity usage is ineffective for appliances that utilize additional/other metered resources. As such, existing privacy countermeasures and metrics need to be reevaluated to address not only electricity, but also any other resource that is metered. Furthermore, a holistic privacy protection approach for all metered resources must be adopted as the information leak from any of the resources has the potential to render the privacy preserving countermeasures for all the other resources futile. This article introduces the privacy preservation problem for multiple HTG metered resources and explores potential solutions for its mitigation.