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Electricity companies scraping data to analyse their customers.
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 20 Apr 2026
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You think this only happens in north america?
I'm pretty sure that would be illegal in the EU at least, as your living circumstances qualify as personal data.
And the whole idea (and OPs indifference to it) is just such an ultra-capitalist thing that it is hard to imagine happening anywhere else than in the US.
(ok, so not everywhere in North America, but that's true for most posts here)
I was a power engineer for a municipal utility, non-profit government entity, they don't have shareholders or profits, the cost to provide the service is the cost of the service. This is not a capitalist thing, this is an engineering thing. They have to estimate the power demand of their customers to efficiently size the power equient and forecast power generation requirements. Them having this information lowers the cost for all customers. Do you expect them to guess if you need 100A or 200A service?
I just tell the power company that I want 60A service, pay for it and then they deliver it. It's none of their business if I use the 40kW to resistance-heat my home or cool down my superconductors, light my weed plantation or melt my own steel.
They really don't care what you do with your power, they absolutely do not give a shit what you do. They just need the info to estimate the demand for infrastructure at the time they turn the power on, if you are an outlier they don't really care as long as you don't create problems for the system.
Lol, good luck with that.
But that's exactly what the previous commenter was getting at.
The square footage is completely useless for that estimate.
They need a load value in Ampere and that is depending not on size but on other factors that the builder of the home or the home owner is much better qualified to estimate than the local supplier is.
And the electric company that later actually sells you the electricity doesn't even need to know the load value of the house, but only the address and meter ID.
The square footage is incredibly useful for estimating the average demand for similar sized units. They are almost always going to have the same basic appliances and heating and cooling, or close enough that it averages out. The demand for a larger unit will be more than for a smaller unit, mostly because they will need a larger HVAC or heater but also because there are more rooms, occupants, stuff plugged in. So we establish an average demand profile for homes of similar size groups.
They absolutely need to know the demand of each unit, if another home off the same feed is built later or upgrades their service they need to know if the existing capacity is sufficient or if components need to be upgraded.
No they don't.
This information is only relevant for the local provider that physically connects to your home, not for the company selling you the elecricity.
But I increasingly get the feeling that you don't have a free electricity consumer market in the US?
That would actually come as a surprise to me, but would explain some of the comprehension problems that l have seen and experienced myself in this thread.
Ah, that's the disconnect. Typically the electric company is the local provider here. Some provide service all the way from generating stations, some broker power contracts from neighboring generating stations but you typically only have one company to buy power from and they are the ones that build the infrastructure to the home. My utility lets you buy power from partnered solar farms, that solar farm would not have any idea what my home size is, but the utility that physically runs the power cables to my house sure does.
Ok, so that's really a major difference here...
In the EU we have heavily liberated energy markets, which let me choose between dozens of different electricity suppliers, each with its own specific value proposition.
In many cases this means that they just compete with each other to deliver the lowest price, but there are also specialized suppliers, e.g. offering custom time or volume based rates.
In my case it is a supplier that is a Greenpeace-originated consumer-owned cooperative (yes, I am one of the owners of the company supplying me with electricity:-) ), specializing in regenerative energy.
These supply companies then pay a part of their revenue to the local providers, reimbursing them for the use of their physical infrastructure.
60A * 230V * 3 Phases = 41,400W
Greetings from Europe ;-)
Here that's done not by the electricity provider but by the planer of the building who just requests the connection load, so the provider can make then sure the infrastructure (cables, transformers) is ready for it.
The provider knows nothing except this requested load value.
And the local provider is in most cases not even the electricity company actually selling you the electric energy.
This company doesn't even know the load value of the estate, let alone such specific things as living area of appartments within it.
Do real estate listings not include square footage on them?
Of course not, that would be a privacy violation. They only share floor plans with square meterage. It's more private because the scraping tools don't like unit conversions.
Well, yes (but square meters, naturally), but not the address.
So scraping would also be pointless.
Are real estate listings in the US published with the address visible?
Maybe a dumb question, how do you post a house for sale without the address. How would potential buyers know where it was located?
Also just to add to the conversation, in the US at least all properties are registered with the government for tax purposes. And all that information is public.
So you don’t even need to scrap real estate listing. You can just get it from the county for free.
Well, an advert would e.g. be like:
"Nice, quite home located in Friedrichshain district, contact for details and to schedule a viewing"
Same at least here in Germany.
important difference is, this real estate tax information is not publicly available.
And only the tax office of the local government has access, even other branches of the government don't.
So in the US this information is available for transparency.
If the government is charging you x dollars a year for your property taxes you can confirm that other similar properties are paying the same/similar rates.
Also for home buying you can confirm the tax rate on the property with the government before buying.
I’m guessing your system is either less prone to manipulation from the government or you all are just more trusting.
Even with this transparency I personally know multiple people who have been able to prove the government was over charging them on their property taxes.
Here the formula used to calculate the real estate taxes is public instead (I take it from your comment that in the US it isn't?), so you don't have to reengineer it looking at other sample values.
And when buying you just ask the seller, they have to provide such kind of information.
The concern isn't with the formula, more just straight up corruption/bigotry. E.g. a house in a minority neighborhood being charged more. Property tax is levied by local governments in the USA, so they're more vulnerable to that sort of thing.
Ok... Still don't get how that helps with the erroneous tax charge, though.
I mean, if you put your estate data into the formula and get another value than the local government is charging you, you already have your absolute proof.
Why would you need more than that?
It’s absolutely legal for a power company to know where their services are delivered, lol. Pretty sure they at the minimum absolutely need to know the connection ID that would uniquely identify your house and apartment. Not so sure that a generic info like rooms and square footage would even be considered personal data.
Also, based on the other thread I think you would have an aneurysm if you knew how much info is publicly available in Sweden.
Would have guessed it to be similar to Germany, but Germans are often... special... in that regard.
And l just remembered we have our own private nightmare data gatherer here in Germany, too.
It is called "Schufa" and basically every financial institution, online seller or insurance company transmits them your financial behaviour to be centrally evaluated to generate a credit score.
Still can't comprehend how this is legal to exist...
My German utility company comes into my (rented) apartment every year to look at the heating units inside my home in person. My town just combines it with the Schornsteinfeger/fire marshal visit, which is pretty convenient, but I was a little shocked that I was required to let people into my home at first.
That's true and would have been complicated to avoid up to now.
Thankfully technology has caught up here and the visits often aren't necessary any more due to RF meters (but at the price of raising a whole new bunch of questions about privacy in the process...)
Schornsteinfeger, like car TÜV, you won't get around, though.