Home Monitoring Will Soon Monitor You

Still, it’s early days for automated consumer load aggregation. The precision of disaggregation available in the Sense service needs time to mature, which it will if more people install the device, allowing the machine-learning backend to bolster the service’s overall knowledge.

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Sense feels like the start of something new and durable among internet-connected devices. Finding that future requires that Sense offers a service compelling enough that consumers will be willing to install the device semi-permanently into their home’s electrical grid. At a time when internet-of-things devices have been responsible for nationwide DDoS attacks and drone-enabled, cascading smart lightbulb hacks, security and privacy might offer the greatest obstacles to its adoption.

On the security front, Sense represents a theoretical improvement over standard-fare internet of things, which are often poorly engineered for security and installed in large numbers. By moving sensing from individual devices to a single sensor on the electrical main, the possible points of attack are reduced—so long as the Sense itself doesn’t get hacked.

But when it comes to privacy, things are more complicated. After all, Sense listens in on and records every electrical apparatus in the home. That’s a lot of potentially invasive—and valuable—data.

Early adopters of the Nest smart thermostat embraced that device without fully considering the implications of its capacity to monitor presence in the home. When Google bought Nest for $3.2 billion, in 2014, it bought the ability to merge that internal view of the home with everything else Google already knows about its users—their web searches, the places they’ve visited and so forth. Sense offers a similar opportunity to slurp up live, granular data on everything people do with electricity in their homes—which is most everything, these days.

Nest knows the general patterns of occupancy in a home, but for anyone with smartphone running Google services like Maps, the company probably knew those patterns already. Sense, by contrast, can know when consumers make use of individual appliances, lights and devices—how often, and for how long.

Monitoring the garage door or the oven might seem innocuous, until one considers the fact that big data is already being used for purposes like insurance and loan underwriting. The frequency and time of day of garage use offers new ways to evaluate and confirm a household’s automotive risk, based on how often they appear to be driving and at what times of day. And the use (or disuse) of an electric oven or cooktop or blender or microwave could be used to draw conclusions about a home’s cooking tendencies, and thereby its occupants’ general health.

Own a table saw or a Hitachi magic wand? Your insurer—or your employer—might want to know about that, too. A job candidate who runs a clothes iron regularly might appear more desirable than one who runs a “personal massager” daily. Likewise, a warehouse pick-and-pack runner who spends days off using power tools might prove a less desirable employee than one who unwinds through innocuous television viewing.

The commercial applications of load disaggregation are also plentiful. Imagine if Amazon or Walmart or Google knew not just what consumers search for and buy, but also what ordinary, nonelectronic products they already own, and how often they use them. Someone’s porn-viewing predilections could be correlated against their toasting habits. Their sleep patterns—determined by lamp or television usage—could be compared to their proclivity for online impulse purchases. Do people who use electric razors daily tend to buy boxers, while those who do so every other day prefer briefs? Soon, Facebook might know and serve the proper ad accordingly.

For now, such granularity is impossible with Sense. But over time, load disaggregation’s potential will improve. And not just because of machine learning, but also because disaggregation could end up getting baked into products—and even the electrical grid itself.

Today, internet of things devices require individual connections to a home network. That’s part of what makes them hard to manage, not to mention unsecure. But it also allows so-called smart devices to be used as dumb ones; the user can always opt out of the wireless features of a kettle or a refrigerator and just brew tea or chill food like usual. But once a load disaggregation hub of Sense’s ilk is installed, basic identification, usage and data reporting could eventually be accomplished via the electric line itself, and without the consumer even knowing.

I asked my Georgia Tech colleague Justin Romberg, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and an expert in digital signal processing to weigh in. If an ordinary appliance like a blender or a razor wanted to cooperate with a power meter, he explains, it could do so easily by sending a predetermined electrical pulse on the line to signal power cycles or even secondary information about what it’s doing.

It’s hypothetical and would take years to roll out, but if standardized and installed in newly manufactured appliances, the result could be made compatible with a local hub like Sense or, via the electrical main, a remote one elsewhere on the grid from the very outset—chattering away, unavoidably and in secret about how its owner uses it.

Of course, that might also entail data collection and aggregation. Luger echoes Phillips’s concerns about data ownership, but also notes people are getting increasingly comfortable sharing their personal data, especially when the results are beneficial. All of which might be fine if Sense could and would secure and isolate that data from other uses in the long run. But as a startup, the company must eventually contend with its status as a business expressly built to become a financial instrument.

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On that front, Sense has an advantage that both impresses and terrifies. Most supposedly “smart” devices are really dumb and stupid. Dumb because they facilitate an Internet of Things You Don’t Really Need—connecting gadgets to the internet mostly complicates tasks that worked perfectly well already. Just ask the guy who spent 11 hours trying to make tea with a Wi-Fi kettle. And stupid because, despite having microprocessors that can do general-purpose computing, these devices mostly act like fancy buttons and data relays.

Factor in the security woes of smart devices, and the internet of things looks foolish, too.

Worse, the alternative to idiotic smarts in devices might not be intelligence, but shrewdness. No matter how earnest and well-intentioned business people like Mike Phillips and Lindsay Luger might seem, those good intentions can’t close the Pandora’s box a service like Sense opens. More than ever, a product’s social and ethical implications must be evaluated in relation to the possible consequences of its likely future use.

Luger says her firm doesn’t go into investments with specific exit strategies in mind.

“Build a great company, and an exit will find you,” she tells me. She points out lots of industries might find Sense’s business an appealing target: Utility companies, her firm’s capital base, offer an obvious acquisition target. But she admits Google and Amazon are possible suitors as well, along with insurance and manufacturing companies that might be interested in real-time data from their appliances. Which suggests any future of widespread, residential load disaggregation is likely also a future of constant scrutiny.

If that future becomes too dystopian, owners could always hire an electrician to remove the Sense device from their panels. But things are never so simple, particularly when curiosities become standards. How easy is it to search the web without Google, after all, or to connect with friends without Facebook, or to network without LinkedIn?

Consumers have already proven willing to hand over personal data for cash or discounts. Insurance is following suit. Soon, drivers might not be able to get auto insurance without connecting a networked device to their vehicles’ on-board diagnostics port. Or health insurance without a fitness tracker. Or a loan without a full-access social media disclosure. Or, perhaps, utility service without a whole-house load disaggregator.

Add to that the uncertainty about how technology companies and the government will cooperate under a Donald Trump presidency, and all of that information about what ordinary people do starts to look less like a fair exchange for free services, and more like an unplanned entry into a society of total surveillance. It may seem quibbling to bring up such matters in the context of a $250 energy monitor few will buy initially, run by apparently well-meaning folks with innocuous intentions. But it always seems that way, until it doesn’t anymore.

The terror of a truly smart gadget like Sense is the same as its promise: that it really is the future, and furthermore that its arrival is inevitable. That’s something to think about when plugging in or turning on an appliance. Eventually, soon even, the tiny electrical load it draws will reach past the blender or the light bulb, out above the house and up into the cloud, where it will replicate onto the ledgers of federal agents and commercial advertisers and corporate actuaries, and remain forever.