A California judge ordered Sacramento’s municipal utility (SMUD) to stop its mass surveillance program of sharing customer electricity data with police. The utility had been algorithmically searching the smart meter data of its 650,000 customers to flag high energy users, providing over 33,000 “tips” to law enforcement for potential marijuana grows without any prior suspicion of wrongdoing.
The lawsuit was brought by a Vietnamese American man who was targeted by police but whose high electricity use was due to medical equipment. Evidence presented in the case, including text messages from utility officials specifically noting the Asian ethnicity of some high-usage households, pointed toward a risk of racial profiling. The ruling found that this kind of speculative data sharing does not constitute an “ongoing investigation” and must cease, reining in a warrantless digital dragnet that turned private utility data into a source for police fishing expeditions.