The post Court rules warrants are needed for cops to access smart electrical meter data appeared first on BardTech . You can tell a lot about what’s going on in a home from how much electricity it’s using — especially when that information is collected every few minutes and recorded centrally. It’s revealing enough that a federal judge has ruled that people with smart meters have a reasonable expectation of privacy and as such law enforcement will require a warrant to acquire that data. It may sound like a niche win in the fight for digital privacy, and in a way it is, but it’s still important. One of the risks we’ve assumed as consumers in adopting ubiquitous technology in forms like the so-called internet of things is that we are generating an immense amount of data we weren’t before, and that data is not always protected as it should be. How to save your privacy from the Internet’s clutches This case is a great example. Traditional spinning meters are read perhaps once a mo...