Recently, I was notified by NVEnergy that I qualified for a free upgrade to my thermostats (which are just standard mercury-controlled numbers for now) through a program called “mPowered Home Energy Management.”

I just use the old-fashioned ones. No breaking in to these.

The deal is that they install these flashy digital thermostats, and that gives them the ability to remotely adjust your settings by +/- 4 degrees. In other words  they have remote control of that aspect of your house. Even so, they would never shut off your climate control if it were very hot or very cold, or make radical adjustments, but the thought of someone else being able to access and manipulate any aspect of my own house is unsettling.

How NVEnergy wants to do it.

This is especially true as the idea of a smart grid becomes more and more of a reality. What the linked page is ultimately telling you is that appliances and electrical infrastructure inside your house will be connected to an electrical grid that can gather data about them and allow for them to be controlled remotely, ostensibly by you.  But it leads to a whole host of other problems. For example, digital haunting.

Consider this article in Forbes, in which security experts hacked into houses and gained the ability to turn lights on and off, as well as the TV, and even gather information about the house itself and in one case a child who lived there. They would actually call the people, tell the people they had gained access to their house’s automated control, then proving it by doing some pretty ghostly things. It’s more an issue of the poor security designed into the products than the invalidity of the products themselves.

See, this is why I stick to the manual climate control. It’s all me.