Energy Resource Control via Privacy Preserving Data

TL;DR

This paper presents a privacy-preserving data release method for smart meters that obscures private information like income and occupancy while maintaining data utility for energy management, using a minimax optimized noise injection.

Contribution

It introduces a novel linear filter-based noise injection technique optimized via a minimax approach to balance privacy and utility in smart meter data.

Findings

Significantly reduces private attribute classification accuracy.

Maintains energy resource control performance.

Effective on real household datasets.

Abstract

Although the frequent monitoring of smart meters enables granular control over energy resources, it also increases the risk of leakage of private information such as income, home occupancy, and power consumption behavior that can be inferred from the data by an adversary. We propose a method of releasing modified smart meter data so specific private attributes are obscured while the utility of the data for use in an energy resource controller is preserved. The method achieves privatization by injecting noise conditional on the private attribute through a linear filter learned via a minimax optimization. The optimization contains the loss function of a classifier for the private attribute, which we maximize, and the energy resource controller's objective formulated as a canonical form optimization, which we minimize. We perform our experiment on a dataset of household consumption with solar generation and another from the Commission for Energy Regulation that contains household smart meter data with sensitive attributes such as income and home occupancy. We demonstrate that our method is able to significantly reduce the ability of an adversary to classify the private attribute while maintaining a similar objective value for an energy storage controller.